Dealing with juice pulp in beverage manufacturing - pulp clogging up canning lines
Looking for help/guidance!
I work for a beverage manufacturer (carbonated beverage canning/bottling) and we do a good amount of co-pack.... a lot of brands are incorporating juice concentrate in their formulas. Clarified juice conc. is no issue, we also special order low pulp orange juice for a few products. Our low pulp OJ has a pulp spec of 'less than 2' and even that will clog up our can fillers from time to time.
FYI UOM for pulp is v/v at single strength brix
We try to avoid using juices with pulp specs much higher than 2-4 to avoid clogging up our fillers, but we have brands/customers come to us with formulas with juice concentrates that have pulp specs up to like 14 v/v.
We also have a customer wanting to mimic spindrift which has a notable amount of pulp in it, so I assume that is probably ran with larger filters on the canning line to allow larger particles of pulp to pass through and make it in the can. The customer wants the appearance to match spindrift, so having some sort of pulp in it is a necessity.
We have a juice manufacturer that can special make certain low pulp juice for us, which usually skyrockets the minimum order quantity to more volume than the customer can sell.
This has been a recurring problem and I'm positive it will continue to be one in the future... we don't really want to make drastic changes to our batching/canning process, but only being able to use clarified juice or having to special order massive quantities of special made low pulp juice is a major limiting factor.
Feel like I can be throwing the purchasing/sourcing team in the weeds when we have a request to develop a beverage... and we're asking them to source a juice that pretty much doesn't exist. Like a pineapple juice concentrate with a pulp spec of less than 2, etc.
My initial thought was during batching manually passing the juice conc. through a fine mesh screen.... however thinking more about it that might be a dopey thought, if "clarifying" a juice concentrate was as easy as passing it through a fine screen then why would juice manufacturers be using a centrifuge to clarify lol.
If anyone has dealt with a similar issue and has any advice or solutions I would greatly appreciate it. Maybe the juice industry will adapt at some point to offering a consistent supply of low pulp options--- sounds unlikely though