PepsiCo Wants To Make Juice As Healthy As Fruit
By Sam Lewis
The snack and beverage giant is aiming to patent a way to add fiber, among other ingredients from fruit and vegetables, to juice and other beverages. It does so hoping to improve the company’s nutrition and sensory profiles, while reducing waste from the juice production process
Filed last April and published last month, PepsiCo has applied for a patent to make consumer beverages as healthy as eating fruit. While juice is good for you, it doesn’t have the same nutritional content as whole fruit. According to the patent application, “the juice extraction process excludes portions of the whole fruit or vegetable that would otherwise be consumed if the fruit or vegetable were to be eaten in its whole form. A consumer who peels and eats an orange will consume an amount of edible material (e.g., including cellulosic material, membranes, albedo, pulp, etc...), which would not necessarily be present if the consumer instead drank juice extracted from the orange.” Continuing, the application reads, “Accordingly, many fruit and vegetable juices lack some of the nutrients contained in the totality of the edible portions of the whole fruit or vegetable. Such nutrients include for example fiber, phytonutrients, and vitamins.”
The Separation Of Fruit And Vegetable Juices
Efforts to supplement beverages with fiber powders have been made before, but often give the drink an unwanted taste. Other tries have dissolved so efficiently in the beverage that consumers don’t believe the product contains added fiber. Attempts at adding larger fibrous pieces have yielded poor coloration, flavors, and bad texture. Additionally, PepsiCo says currently available fiber supplements “may not offer a physiological benefit in terms of metabolic health.” Further, the company argues, “A need exists for a product containing a higher viscosity with the subsequent enhanced metabolic health benefits.”
PepsiCo’s answer to the problem at hand is to incorporate wasted, but edible, pieces of fruit from juice extraction and incorporate them into the final beverage product. “It would be beneficial to process the edible portions of fruits and vegetables obtained from juice extraction to provide a useful food ingredient, or 'co-product' to enhance the nutrition and other attributes of fruit and vegetable juice. Moreover, employing such co-products minimizes waste from the juice extraction process.”
Post-Purification Of Beet Sugar Juice Optimized By Efficient In-Line pH-Measurement
The patent describes a variety of beverages with polyphenol-rich co-products from juice making that have skins, peels, pulp and seeds. These portions of the fruit provide nutritional benefits such as blood-sugar control, better intestinal health, and the feeling of being full. According to PepsiCo, “It is another advantage of the invention to provide a beverage or comestible which upon consumption provides the benefits of increased satiety and improved glucose control. It is yet a further advantage of the invention to provide a beverage containing a co-product from juice extraction that is highly fermentable by colonic microflora and has the ability to increase short chain fatty acid product in the gut.”
PepsiCo claims some products that have undergone the process have very similar nutritional profiles to “the whole fruit(s) or vegetable(s) from which the juice was obtained.” Further, in some cases, “even higher levels of phytonutrients found in the whole fruit and/or vegetable but are less perishable due to the pasteurization process”, notes PepsiCo. “In some cases [they have] weeks or months of shelf life as opposed to days for some fresh fruit or vegetables.”