JBT ally IceGen is a specialist in Liquid Ice generation, an innovative technology which provides a wide variety of applications to extend shelf life and aid in product transportation. Through IceGen’s alliance with JBT, the system is now being made available to a far wider customer base across the global liquid foods sector and is poised to bring tangible advantages to juice and liquid food producers and exporters.
IceGen’s scraped surface, heat exchangers create Liquid Ice that is used to increase quality, speed up processes and significantly increase savings within the juice industry. The Liquid Ice is an energy efficient, cost effective system that delivers results that far outweigh those of traditional systems.
Cost savings
Using considerably less energy than conventional systems, the technology has significant cost saving advantages for juice or vegetable producing companies. When filling tankers with an IceGen, juice can be shipped for several weeks without the need of refrigerated trucks. Juice is cooled inline and drums are frozen in a fraction of the time.
According to Motti Einhorn, president of IceGen Corp, the moment a product enters the IceGen, the water particles within the product are instantly frozen creating millions of tiny ice crystals that act as heat exchangers. The cooling power of these millions of crystals is huge.
“You can keep food and juice cool for a month without any refrigeration by using Liquid Ice,” Einhorn explains. “The crystals within the juice or product use their latent cooling power to maintain the cool temperature without the need for additional cooling. We are able to load a tanker at 30ºF and 30 days later receive it at the same temperature.”
The Juice plants using an IceGen save money by removing the need for refrigerated transport and by freezing drums in a fraction of the time.
IceGen supplied machinery to convert Liquid Ice into snow for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics
Homogenous freezing
Liquid Ice is pumpable like any other liquid, yet it has more cooling power than solid ice. When freezing a drum with Liquid Ice, the juice or liquid will freeze homogenously, without any separation of water and sugar particles as is seen in traditional freezing. This preserves the taste, aroma, color and overall quality of the product. When a drum, frozen with Liquid Ice, is removed from the freezer it defrosts homogenously too and it tastes as fresh as did when it was frozen. The ‘pineapple effect’ is avoided and there are no interior pockets of warm juice when freezing.
“It works much better than a blast freezer because it’s much softer on the product and much faster,” says Einhorn. “The product comes into the machine and goes out with every part of the product at the freeze point. It is as effective on greens and vegetables and purees as it is on juice. We are even using it now on chunks of fruit and vegetables with the same success. Customers have also complained about a ‘frozen taste’ with products that go through a blast freezer – with Liquid Ice you never have that problem.
“Customers have told us: ‘When buying from other growers inevitably we end up purchasing products that have come through an IceGen because the product quality is so superior'”.
IceGen’s worldwide footprint is truly global with almost 100 machines in every continent. With more people becoming aware of the many advantages of the IceGen, that number is growing daily.