What Is Aseptic?
Surely you have heard of “Aseptic” word in food industry. It is a
process of production and packaging that can make cold keeping of
productions unnecessary. Using this method is very common for
productions like milk, fruit juices, concentrates, purees and
pastes. And even it's being used for products with small pieces like
cheese, meat products, fruits and vegetables. Aseptic has a Greek
root and it means microbe free.If you search in Wikipedia for
aseptic technique it will guide you to methods which are used in
sterile conditions. Mostly in medical and laboratory uses and it
depends on standard cultures.
Aseptic in food industry:
Sterilization or commercial aseptic is reducing microorganisms to a
specified point. As you know, microorganisms population follow
logarithmic formulas and complete destruction of them needs so much
time that it will affect main production too. But aseptic uses
higher temperatures in a short time to save the quality, nutrients,
tissues, colors and other production quality specifications.
How Aseptic works?
Usually packaging containers and food productions are
sterilized in separated systems and they will be united and capped
in aseptic conditions, So sterilized packaging containers with
sterilized food productions will be packaged in a sterilized
condition.
Aseptic packaging system stages:
- Sterilization of raw materials.
- Sterilization of packaging containers.
- Sterilization of system and equipment.
- Filling and packaging in a sterile condition.
- Keeping and distributing in sterile condition.
Advantages of Aseptic packaging:
-
Keeping the quality of food productions due to high temperature
and short process time.
-
Economical and high efficient heat exchange due to wide
exchanging surfaces in heat exchangers.
-
Packaging containers and their sizes will not affect in heat
penetration.
-
Product durability will be increased without the need of
refrigerators.
Aseptic Stages:
This Process has 4 stages in fruit purees:
-
Heating production: Including heating production to a specified
temperature.
-
Holding time: Keeping production heat in a specified temperature
for a specified time.
-
Cooling production: Cooling production to a specified
temperature.
-
Filling production in sterilized condition in packaging
containers.
Capacity of FFE machines, manufactured by Fanavar Mehvar Amir
Machine is 2000 to 6000 kilograms per hour and they can aseptic
tomato pastes to 37 bricks. They include PLC controlling unit and
full automated actuators and all processes of washing,
sterilization and production are managed and done without human
interference.
These machines include two all steel aseptic fillers with the
ability of filling bags with 2 to 1000 kilograms capacity. Fillers
are equipped with loadcells and controls the production weight.
Also these machines are equipped with a complete 150 bar piston
pump.
