Beverage, Dairy & Sauce

Short answer: Start from the product, its shelf life and the market it is sold in: chilled or ambient, thin or thick, with or without pieces. That sets the heat treatment and filling route, and the heat treatment step — pasteuriser, retort or cooking kettle — usually decides how the rest of the line is sized.

Machines and lines in this group

Machine or line	What it does	Choose it when
Juice and Beverage Processing Line	Extracts or blends, treats, heats and fills juices and drinks	You make juices, nectars or blended drinks
Dairy Processing Line	Receives, standardises, heats, cultures and fills milk products	You make fresh milk, yogurt or long-life milk
Soy Milk and Tofu Processing Line	Soaks and grinds beans, cooks soy milk and forms tofu	You make soy drinks, tofu or both
Sauce Processing Line	Prepares, cooks, mixes and fills sauces	You make chilli, tomato or seasoning sauces
Jacketed Cooking Kettle	Cooks and stirs batches with an indirect heating jacket	You cook sauces, jams, fillings or soup bases in batches
Colloid Mill	Grinds wet products into fine pastes	You need smooth nut pastes, sesame paste or sauces
Food Homogenizer	Breaks fat droplets and particles under pressure	Your drink or sauce must stay stable without separating
Pasteurizer	Heats and holds liquids, then cools them	You need controlled, recorded heat treatment of flowing products
Food Retort	Sterilises sealed containers under pressure	You sell shelf-stable products in cans, jars or pouches

How to choose

1. Define product, pack and shelf life. Chilled juice, long-life milk, hot-filled sauce and retorted ready meals each need a different heat treatment and filling route.
2. Get the process requirements from the right people. Heat treatment conditions are set by your process authority, food safety team or local rules, not by the equipment supplier. Codex guidance for milk products focuses on validated control measures that achieve a safe outcome rather than prescribing one process, so expect to validate your own process on the line.
3. Set capacity in the right units. Liquid lines are usually sized in litres per hour of product through the heat treatment step; batch cookers on batch volume and cycle time; retorts on containers per cycle.
4. Find the bottleneck. It is often the pasteuriser or retort, or the filler when several pack sizes are run. Buffer tanks between processing and filling absorb short stops, so one machine does not halt the other.
5. Match product character to machines. Viscosity, particle size and sugar or salt content decide pump types, heat exchanger design and whether a colloid mill or homogeniser is needed.
6. Plan cleaning from the start. Closed tanks and pipework are normally cleaned in place, so the line layout, return flow and drains must be designed for it. Decide early whether one cleaning station serves the whole plant or each line has its own.

Common mistakes

• Choosing a heat exchanger without checking it can handle the product’s particles and viscosity.
• Buying a filler faster than the heat treatment step can supply.
• Leaving clean-in-place out of the first budget and adding it later at higher cost.
• Sizing a batch kettle on volume alone, without counting heating, cooling, filling and cleaning time in each cycle.

If you combine several of these products in one plant, our turnkey projects page explains how we design and supply complete lines.