RTD Beverage Industry

The past few years have seen considerable growth in retorted or commercially sterilized ready-to-drink (RTD) beverage production in the US. Allpax has been involved in most of this market growth and has the largest installed base of rotary water immersion retorts serving the RTD beverage industry today. With lower barriers to entry, both from a capital and regulatory stand-point compared to aseptic processing, as well as having more versatility, batch retorts afford smaller processors access to this expanding market.

While the Allpax models 1300 and 1600 rotary water immersion retorts are capable of processing all types of containers being utilized in the food processing and nutraceutical industries, they are particularly effective when processing dairy based beverages in glass containers. The combination of rotary agitation and water immersion processing provides several advantages:

• Agitation prevents "burn-on" which occurs when dairy products are exposed to the high temperatures of retort processing. Product quality in inherently improved.
• Agitation stirs the product during the thermal process thus distributing heat inside the container more rapidly and consistently, which both shortens the time the product needs to be exposed to heat and increases throughput.
• Water immersion provides buoyancy to the retort load, thus affording the dual benefits minimizing container breakage and reducing the required clamping force on the containers which can stress the delicate seal material in the container closure.

Allpax rotary water immersion retorts are robust retort platforms with a proven track record, as demonstrated by the installation of multiple high capacity batch retort production lines operated by the largest RTD beverage producers in the US. For more information about our production rotary water immersion retorts, and our supporting line of R&D/pilot production retorts, please reach out to us and/or visit our Production Retorts and R&D retorts pages.