Ketchup Production Lines

Ingredients preparation

Depending by the capacity of the plant and on the recipe requested by the customer, different ingredient preparation groups can be foreseen to allow automatic (or semiautomatic) dosing and loading into the blending section. These groups can be:

• Tomato paste dilution group: the tomato paste is diluted to approx. 20 brix to be transferred in the blending line;
• Process water heating group with buffering tank;
• Sugar dosing system and syrup preparation group. The group can be completed with a dedicated pasteurizer;
• Salt dosing system and brine preparation group;
• Starch, thickeners or preservatives dosing system and dissolving group;
• Aroma, flavours or spices (liquid or powdered) dosing group;
• Other ingredients like vegetable or fruit intermediates (for example concentrated fruit purees) dosing group;
• Vegetables rehydration, pasteurization and dosing unit to add vegetable pieces, after pasteurization of the ketchup.
  All the ingredient preparation groups are fully customized based on the available recipes.

Blending section

Bertuzzi foresees a very efficient blending system based on special horizontal mixing tanks. In order to shorter the batch time, the system can be designed to receive all the prepared ingredients simultaneously thanks to an advanced dosing system automatically controlled by the general control panel of the line. This allow to have high performances with high reliability on the recipes.

Deaeration, homogenization and pasteurization

The blended ketchup (or vegetable sauce) ready to be pasteurized is delivered to fully integrated system that allow the following phases:

• preheating to the product up to the deaerating temperature;
• deaeration, thanks to a deaerator specifically designed for viscous products, of the product in order to reduce the potential oxidation;
• homogenizing at high pressure to reduce the product fibres sizes, resulting in an increase of product viscosity. In case of ketchup recipes with starch the homogenization can be bypassed;
• pasteurization and cooling at filling temperature (depending by the filling characteristics) with tubular heat exchanger;
  As an option the product can pass through a dedicated shear mixer in order to give the shine glaze effect to the ketchup.
  Before the filling the prepared vegetable pieces can be automatically injected into the product for the production of ketchup with solids.

Sauces with dices

for the production of dices Bertuzzi can supply the Cubomatic, a dicing machine with high capacity designed to peel and dice tomatoes in one only operation. It can produce tomato dices with size 14, 16 or 18 mm.

Cleaning of the plant

All Bertuzzi lines are designed according to the international food grade requirements and to be fully cleanable by exploiting integrated cleaning procedures and systems or centralized and fully automatic CIP system. The Bertuzzi CipMatic is specifically designed to guarantee a perfect and efficent CIP of the fruit processing plants.