During concentration, you can greatly reduce the volume of juice while reducing storage, packaging and transportation costs. Nevertheless, concentration also brings some problems. Fruit juice can lose much of its aroma, color and nutrients during vacuum evaporation. Some other problems are the corruption of the concentrate in form of gel structures and browning during concentration.

Fruit juice concentrate processing is a complex operation that results in many different products. There are several varieties of fruit juice concentrates and they all vary in their fruit and sugar content. Fruit concentrates without any added sugar are mostly labeled as 100% fruit concentrates and only contain natural sugars.

Fruit puree and fruit concentrate may seem similar, but their manufacturing processes are quite different. Fruit puree is made from ground and homogenized fruit and has the fruit’s original water content. It is thicker than fruit concentrate and retains all the juice and the fibrous matter that the fruit naturally possesses. Also, fruit puree is deaerated – oxygen is expelled from the puree to prevent oxidization with iron particles in the fruit. It can be used as infant food, as an addition to alcoholic drinks (craft beer and fruit wine) or in jam production. Another similar yet different product is fruit-pulp which often gets confused with puree and concentrate.