Since the approval of hydrogen peroxide as a package sterilant by the Food and Drug Administration in January 1981, aseptic processing has exploded onto the U.S. marketplace. In fact, during the summer of 1989, an expert panel from the Institute of Food Technologists voted aseptic technology as the food industry’s top innovation of the past 50 years. The major commercial success to date has been the aseptic processing of high acid fruit juices and fruit drinks, particularly when packaged in the 250 ml, single serve, laminated paper box. (Slide 2) Over three billion unit volumes were sold in 1989. This represents greater than a 12% increase over 1988 and means aseptic packaging has captured a larger unit volume than any other food packaging technology has ever done in so short a time. This paper will look at the technologies involved as they relate to citrus juices, the precautions which should be taken to optimize the product, and the promises which the future holds. Paper published with permission.

TASTE evaporators were invented in the 1960’s in order to improve the flavor of concentrated orange juice. Most of the evaporators in service at this time were of the forced re-circulation type and the concentrated product was of inferior quality and had burned or cooked flavors. TASTE is an acronym for Temperature Accelerated Short Time Evaporator and its innovation was to reduce the temperature and amount of contact time that the juice spent in this thermally abusive environment. In this paper, the authors would like to explore two different but complementary issues concerning evaporators. One discussion concerns streamlining the process and operation of evaporators in order to gain multiple benefits in a plant environment. The other is to discuss new control technologies, specifically “Advanced” or Model Predictive Control and its application to automated °Brix control. Paper published with permission.