4 replies to this topic

[WorldWideRegulatory]

Hello,

 

Please could you teach me how to know the juice content from reading a formula.The product is a concentrate/cordial that needs to be diluted by the consumer in a ratio of one to seven.

The formula says the Blackcurrant concentrate before dilution is 8.2mg/100g and after dilution is 1.17mg/serving. Does this mean the juice content before dilution is 8.2% and after dilution is 1.17%

 

Thank you.

[pHruit]

There is some info missing that would allow you to calculate these things.

For the first step, the concentrate is 8.2mg/100g. To work out the single-strength juice content of this, you'd need to know how concentrated the blackcurrant is. Typically this would be commercially produced as a 65 Brix product, so from that assumption you can to an extent estimate the juice content.

Normally the target Brix for this type of product uses uncorrected refractometric Brix, so you can estimate the corrected Brix value by also estimating the acidity - it's a relatively acidic fruit, so I don't think you'd go too far wrong assuming that the titratable acid content is at least 15% weight/weight as anhydrous citric acid.

From the acidity you can find the correction to the Brix value using e.g. the USCL Customs Methods document I shared in this thread (which is probably worth a read through in general on this topic): https://www.ifsqn.co...ted-bx-content/

From that, you can see that the correction is +2.81 Brix, so we will assume that the Brix of the concentrate is 65+2.81 = 67.81.

We then need the Brix value of Blackcurrant at single strength. This may depend on where the product is being sold, as e.g. the US has slightly different minimum Brix values to the UK/EU for some fruits. In the EU, the minimum for blackcurrant would be 11.6.

 

We can then estimate the concentration factor as the concentrate Brix divided by the single strength Brix, i.e. 67.81 / 11.6 = 5.846.

This means that 1g of concentrate is equivalent to 5.846g of juice, so 8.2mg concentrate is equivalent to 8.2*5.846 = 47.937mg of juice.

 

For the next part of the calculation, you'd need to know (a) what the dilution rate is, and (b) what the serving size is.

[WorldWideRegulatory]

Thank you so much. 

 

I have a similar case with Orange concentrate before dilution at 7.4mg/100g and after dilution is 1.06mg/serving.

The dilution rate for both is one to seven and serving size is 200ml. 

[pHruit]

 

I have a similar case with Orange concentrate before dilution at 7.4mg/100g

OK, so you'd plug in the relevant values for orange into the calculation in my earlier post. In this case, orange juice concentrates are typically standardised at 66 Brix corrected, so you might not need to bother with the acid correction step. If the product is clear then this suggests a clarified orange concentrate, in which case things are slightly less universally standardised, and you'd then need to know the Brix and acidity for your concentrate.

 

 

The dilution rate for both is one to seven and serving size is 200ml

 

You'd need to know whether the dilution rate is weight/weight (e.g. 1kg compound plus 7kg water), volume/volume (1L compound plus 7L water), or weight/volume (1kg compounds plus 7L water). The differences between these could be minor or quite significant, dependent on the density of the cordial.

[WorldWideRegulatory]

Thank you so much!