What equipment is needed for a juice production line?
Juice production lines, varying from small-scale artisanal operations to large industrial facilities, rely on a sequence of specialized equipment tailored to fruit preparation, extraction, clarification, pasteurization, and packaging—each component critical to preserving flavor, nutritional value, and shelf life while ensuring efficiency and compliance.
Fruit Preparation Equipment
The initial stage of juice production, fruit preparation, focuses on cleaning, sorting, and preparing raw materials to remove contaminants and ensure consistency, as impurities like dirt, stems, or damaged fruit can compromise final product quality and damage downstream equipment.
Cleaning and Sorting Machinery
Fruit washing machines are essential for removing surface dirt, pesticides, and debris, with designs ranging from spray washers (for delicate fruits like berries) to brush washers (for harder fruits like apples or oranges). These machines use potable water, often combined with food-grade sanitizers, and feature adjustable pressure settings to avoid bruising. Sorting equipment, meanwhile, separates damaged, unripe, or foreign objects from usable fruit—manual sorting tables are common for small lines, while large facilities use automated optical sorters that detect color, size, and defects via cameras and air jets to reject不合格 products. For operations handling stone fruits (e.g., peaches, plums), destoning machines are also required to remove pits, preventing damage to extraction equipment and ensuring consumer safety.
Cutting and Crushing Equipment
Most fruits require size reduction before extraction to maximize juice yield and efficiency. Cutting machines, such as slicers or dicers, break down large fruits (e.g., watermelons, pineapples) into smaller pieces, while crushers or grinders reduce softer fruits (e.g., tomatoes, grapes) into a pulp or mash. For citrus fruits like oranges or lemons, specialized scoring machines create small incisions in the peel to facilitate juice release during extraction, a step that also helps reduce bitter compounds from the peel entering the juice