Of Soft Drinks and Fruit Juices

It could be said that freshly pressed fruit juice provides the truly natural answer to all the requirements of a soft drink: thirst quenching, fresh, healthy, flavour-some, nutritional and, of course, natural. So why should it have been necessary to look any further towards the creation of different flavour types and the myriad of drink varieties that has appeared over the years in beverage markets around the world? Necessity, being the mother of invention, has been the driving force in all this. In the early years of the industry there was a real necessity for soft drinks manufacturers, in order to stay in business, to control a major threat to their trade, that of microbial fermentation and spoilage of the bottled product. A freshly squeezed orange or fresh pulped and strained apple would supply a fruit juice drink for immediate consumption, but to expect it to maintain its quality for even a day or two was tempting providence. Nowadays, with the benefit of ultra-high temperature (UHT) pasteurisation, aseptic packaging techniques and systems, pressed juices can be stored for extended periods with very little deterioration in quality. Previously, reliance had to be places upon the use of preservatives and 'classical' pasteurisation at lower temperatures (70ºC+) and longer holding times. As businesses grew and production and filling lines enlarged and developed, so did understanding of the need for correct sanitisa-tion of the plant items. The progressive nature of the soft drinks industry has meant that throughout its history there have been many innovative developments , and in the early years these centred on the filling and packaging, or containerising, of beverages. During the second half of the twentieth century, apart from the continuous move towards more efficient means of production and marketing of bottled or canned soft drink products, there was much progress in our knowledge of the constituents responsible for perceived flavour notes. Advances in instrumental analytical techniques have made it possible to identify those chemicals in natural extracts (whether of fruit or botanical origin) that provide the characteristic flavour profile. The advent of gas chromatography in the 1950s, its coupling with the diagnostic strength of mass spectroscopy (GC–MS) and the remarkable improvements in column sensitivity have no doubt been critical factors in the generation of the large numbers of beverage flavours and drink types available on today's market. This analytical knowledge, apart from leading the way to 'designer drinks', has …