Low-temperature fruit juice evaporator

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Atlantic Canada is internationally recognized for their apple industry. Due to unique cool-climate conditions,local apples have a distinctive phenolic profile, which determines their flavor and health benefits. Althoughmost of the apples are sold as a fresh produce, a large portion undergo value-added processing to make applejuice, apple cider and apple pies. Our industry partner, Apple Valley Foods is the largest pie manufacturer inCanada with a strong commitment to premium quality, energy savings and technology driven innovation. Thespecific problem of Apple Valley is that their large production volume and high quality standards result in thegeneration of significant apple waste stream of more than 5 Million lbs annually. To address the problem ofwaste stream management, the company is looking for innovative technologies for a value-added apple wasterecovery. Based on a preliminary discussion between industry and university, a novel concept of a highlyefficient extraction of raw juice through cold-pressing and water evaporation was proposed. However, theconcept is new and additional pilot scale research is required. This will be a first time partnership betweenApple Valley and Dr. Alex Martynenko (Dalhousie University), who has significant expertise inlow-temperature drying and evaporation. The goal of this project is investigate the efficiency of the materialand energy recovery, as well as scalability of a novel concept on the pilot-scale level. This project will take sixmonths and will benefit industry by minimizing risks of industrial scaling. The knowledge on energy efficiencyand apple juice quality gained in this project will be used for an industrial scaling of energy-efficient lowtemperature evaporator. IP arising from this project will belong to Apple Valley Foods. It is expected thatcommercial application of this research will allow Apple Valley to address both energy saving and currentwaste management problems. The project implementation will demonstrate the potential of anindustry-university collaborative effort for innovative process/product research and development, and boosttechnology transfer to other food industry stakeholders.