Many of the shelf-stable foods that we know and love — ready-meals, baby food, canned vegetables, milk, fruit juices, non-carbonated beverages, coffee, and more — require product sterilization. At the heart of the product sterilization process are JBT’s retorts. As sustainability becomes increasingly important for consumers and for the food and beverage industry at large, JBT is redefining in-container sterilization and sustainability for its customers by making the necessary improvements to its existing technology.
JBT is on the cutting edge of sustainability-driven retort technology developments and recently unveiled an all new, best-in-class SuperStatic Retort, as well as an Energy Recovery System (ERS) that seamlessly integrates into new and existing JBT Steam Water Spray (SWS) retort systems.
About the All-New SuperStatic Retort
Designed to handle containers and packaging for an array of food and beverage products, JBT’s SuperStatic Retort guarantees the pressure and temperature needed to ensure sterilization and achieves target food safety and shelf-stability objectives important to our customers across markets. Among its many improvements, the SuperStatic Retort shortens the overall sterilization process time, equipping our customers with the technology to simultaneously produce higher quality products and save energy. Furthermore, this technology requires fewer retorts overall, which increases throughput with less machinery, capacity, and cost savings, along with creating more space on a production floor.
About the ERS Product Development
JBT’s newly available and highly sustainable Energy Recovery System (ERS) product development seamlessly integrates into new and existing JBT Steam Water Spray (SWS) retort systems, which provides customers up to 30% energy savings without interruption to their operations. By optimizing energy recovery through an integrated system of software and hardware, ERS can be engineered to order and optimized for individual customer products. Further, the JBT supplied control system manages and monitors the ERS performance.
How Does It Work?
Heat from the hot cooling water is collected and stored. The stored heat energy will be transferred to the cold process water once the next retort come-up phase starts. The JBT supplied control system manages and monitors the ERS performance.
Overall Sustainability Upgrades to JBT’s Retort Energy Recovery System
Our Retort Energy Recovery System now leverages a passive suction system that draws in water evenly along the length of the retort. This allows less water to be used during the thermal process, which means less steam is needed to heat and less water is needed to cool. Compared to a standard pump suction, this system uses 45% less water. The reduction in steam usage also decreases the overall thermal load of the cooling tower, which contributes to substantial energy savings. In fact, the system offers such a high return on investment, the payback on investment is less than three years based solely on utility cost savings from our steam reduction technology.
JBT’s Ongoing Commitment to Innovation and Sustainability
JBT’s commitment to innovation that supports our customer’s needs is second to none. By integrating the new SuperStatic Retort and ERS into future plans, JBT is helping our customers reach their sustainability goals and the targets they already have in place. With their many sustainability benefits, the new SuperStatic Retort and ERS upgrades are examples of JBT’s commitment to continued innovation across our product lines.
Customers can get in touch with JBT to learn more about the savings of the product, utility costs, and to estimate ROI by visiting https://www.jbtc.com/foodtech. To learn more about the technology driving innovation in sustainability and how JBT supports its customers’ sustainability efforts, explore our latest ESG report: https://www.jbtc.com/about-us/esg/.