Starting a fruit and vegetable processing business can be a lucrative venture, given the essential role these foods play in our daily lives. The key to success lies in prioritizing the freshness and cleanliness of the produce. To streamline operations, a fruit and vegetable processing line is crucial.
This automated system efficiently handles tasks like picking, cleaning, cutting, and packaging, ensuring the cleanliness and hygiene of the final product. By investing in a processing line, you not only extend the shelf life and freshness of fruits and vegetables but also make them readily available for direct sale in supermarkets. It’s a smart move in the fast-paced world of consumer products, where concerns about product hoarding are minimal.
The main way to start a new fruit and vegetable processing business to increase profits is to keep the freshness and cleanliness of the vegetables, so how can we keep the freshness of the fruits and vegetables? The details are explained below.
1. Harvest and inspection of raw materials
Not all vegetables are suitable for clean vegetable processing. Clean vegetable processing is very important to the selection of raw materials. Vegetables can easily cause mechanical damage during harvesting and transportation. When using a knife, the knife needs to be sharp and handled with care during transportation; choose No mechanical damage, no insects, no disease spots, uniform color, same size, same maturity, reject unqualified vegetables.
2. Raw material pretreatment
The pretreatment of raw materials is mainly cooling treatment, that is, according to the characteristics of raw materials, natural or mechanical methods are used to reduce the temperature of post-harvest vegetables to a suitable low-temperature range as soon as possible and maintain the low temperature to facilitate subsequent processing. Vegetables are full of water, have high specific heat, high respiration activity, and rot quickly. After harvesting, they will deteriorate rapidly. Pre-cooling is the first link of the cold chain cycle, and it is also the key to the successful connection of the entire cold chain technology. Now, cold water cooling forced air cooling, and vacuum cooling is mostly used.
3. Cleaning and cutting
The purpose of cleaning is to remove dust, dirt, microorganisms, parasite eggs and residual pesticides on the surface of vegetables. Careful cleaning is required before processing. Cleaning with chlorine or citric acid content of 100-200 mg/L can be effective. Extend shelf life. General experiments show that cleaning the cut lettuce with sodium hypochlorite can control the browning of the product and the number of pathogenic bacteria. The traditional cleaning method is immersion cleaning, and a bubble-type cleaning machine is used. The cutting size needs to be both conducive to preservation and meet dietary requirements, and the cutting tool needs to be sharp. The vegetable cutting machine is used, and the cutting is uniform and smooth and sharp.
4. Rinse and dehydration treatment
The cut vegetable raw materials should be washed again to reduce microbial contamination and prevent oxidation, and the color protection is mainly to prevent the browning of fresh-cut vegetables, which is the main quality problem of fresh-cut vegetables. The vegetables can be blanched by a blanching machine to deactivate the activity of the enzymes of the vegetables. The cut and washed vegetables should be dehydrated, usually using a centrifuge.
Starting a fruit and vegetable processing business is not difficult, as long as you have a fruit and vegetable processing line, you can achieve automated production. We are a vegetable processing line manufacturer, if you want to start a vegetable processing business, you can contact us, we will provide you with solutions and quotations to help your new business succeed.