Whether it’s fruit chunks, fibres or cereals: upgrading juices and other beverages by adding solid constituents is very much in vogue right now. But highly appreciated as this is by consumers, it does in fact entail substantial additional costs and both qualitative and quantitative compromises in the production process. At least it did until now. In the shape of the DosaFlex unit, however, Krones has meanwhile launched an alternative on the market, which ensures accurate, gentle and above all affordable dosing of solid constituents into beverages.
What’s special about DosaFlex is that the system adds the solids, which are produced under aseptic conditions, to the juice flow directly from the aseptic containers, shortly before the juice is filled, thus protecting them from unnecessary thermal stress: instead of heating up the sensitive particles together with the beverage’s liquid part in the UHT unit, they are dosed into the product flow just shortly before filling – aseptically safe, with high dosing accuracy, and entirely without thermal stress.
An indubitably elegant solution that shows up above all in product quality levels. For particles with an edge length of more than three millimetres, for example, the damage rate is reduced to below five per cent. When it comes to dosing accuracy, the result is similarly gratifying: this newly developed Krones device obviates the need for overdosing the expensive raw material so as to guarantee the desired concentration in the bottled product. Its minimal deviations of 0.3 per cent make for commercially viable consumption of the expensive solids.
The DosaFlex handles particles up to 10 millimetres in size, at hourly throughputs of between 60 and 1,500 litres. Its small dimensions and low costs render the system particularly suitable for beverage producers who want to try out new drinks with a particle content on test markets.
