Making juice beverages without preservatives

Beverage producer Bidco, in Kenya, has installed a NitroHotfill line from Krones, which combines two advantages: firstly, it hot-fills the products and therefore doesn’t require any additional preservatives, and secondly, it doesn’t require the use of any thick-walled PET containers.

Kenya’s demand for more healthy products is on the rise so opting for a technology that could bottle beverages with a juice content without preservatives was one of the determinant factors behind Bidco’s choice of Krones.

“This Krones technology offers us a major advantage: we can do without preservatives, and nonetheless don’t have to use any thick-walled containers reinforced with vacuum panels,” explained Bidco’s Board Chairman, Dr Vimal Shah.

The moulds for the 0.3, 0.5 and 1.5 L bottles were developed by Bidco in conjunction with Krones. Here, the company opted for wide-neck containers with a neck finish diameter of 38 mm.

As an alternative to conventional hot-filling, the NitroHotfill process uses nitrogen, which is dosed into the bottle after the filling function has been completed. This increases the internal pressure and equalises the shrinkage behaviour.

After the bottle has been capped, its head-space is then sterilised by bringing the bottle to a horizontal position and thus enabling the product at a temperature of 85°C to fill the entire head-space. After subsequent re-cooling to ambient temperature in the LinaCool, approximately 0.3 bar of nitrogen remains in the bottle, which increases the stability and thus the transportation characteristics of the comparatively lighter PET bottles as well.

Bidco sees its entry into the beverage market as an important step forward for expanding its range of consumer goods — and many other beverages are set to follow.