What is NFC juice?
With the improvement of living standard, customers pay more attention to the health and nature. Healthy and low-calorie drinks become more popular.
NFC juice rises in response to the market trend. NFC is the short version of Not From Concentrate. It is produced by fruit juice extraction, sterilization and filling, without the concentration or reduction process. So NFC juice preserves more nutrition and flavors than traditional drinks. Also, the technology and price are higher.
NFC juice production process:
* NFC juice usually adopts original juice or frozen original juice as raw materials.
* Original juice are extracted from fresh fruits. The fruits need cleaning and sorting before extracting.
* If it is made of frozen fruit juice, the first step is to unfreeze.
* To make blended fruit juice, you need to mix different fruit juice in proportion.
* Sterilization has ultra-high pressure processing and pasteurization method. The former one is carried out in normal
temperature, so it has less damage to the juice flavor and nutrition.
* Filling process also has cold-filling and hot-filling 2 methods. Cold filling requires to lower the temperature of sterilized
juice to 20ºC. Cold-filling fruit juice has shorter shelf life and need to be preserved in cold storage.
Based on different production technology, NFC juice can be classified into room temperature NFC juice and Cold-storage NFC juice. The latter is more popular. It has higher nutritive value and better taste, but it also has higher requirement on the cold chain, and shorter shelf life.
The shelf life of NFC juice is influenced by the raw materials quality, processing technology, and packaging. Usually, it is
shorter than 1 month in 0-4ºC condition.