Fruity and Functional

 A MONGST the most successful launches worldwide have been value-added juices and dairy drinks with pieces of fruit. These products have normally been found in the chilled section, and consumers have enjoyed the enhanced mouthfeel of the drinks enough to pay a premium for them. Even more recently, however, beverage makers have introduced drinks with bits of fruit and vegetables in aseptic cartons.
  Real fruit pieces added to juice and milk drinks intensify the character of healthy snacks that are right in line with the current health and wellness trend. Packaged in aseptic carton packs, they become more convenient to purchase, store and bring along in a lunch bag or rucksack.
 To create such premium beverages, 'drinksplus' technology has been developed by SIG Combibloc makes it possible to aseptically fill in carton packs new trend drinks containing pieces of food that add extra value. This can be done quickly and cost-effectively using standard filling machines from SIG Combibloc for liquid dairy and non-carbonated soft drinks (NCSD).
Advances in the company's technology (first featured two years ago in FMJE February 2010) now make it possible to aseptically fill drinks containing coconut flakes, nuts or a wide variety of cereal grains. These long-life products can contain up to 10% natural particulates; the individual particulates in drinksplus products can be up to six millimetres in length and width.
  "When we started working on the drinksplus project, the focus was on the development of product concepts and the technical implementation of the system. The aim was to offer our customers total solutions to enable them to create added-value products. We wanted solutions that comprise the product treatment and the process technology prior to filling, the filling and the downstream process," says Norman Gierow, Global Market Segment manager at SIG Combibloc, who has been involved with the project from the beginning.

Completely new drinks segment
Working with experienced global technology companies, SIG Combibloc developed three basic technical variants for the product processing and filling of drinksplus products. These variants can be customised to suit the food manufacturer's production facilities, and the respective product concept. This makes it possible for manufacturers in the beverage industry to break into a completely new segment for products aseptically packaged in beverage cartons, enabling them to supplement an already successful product range or a brand portfolio with added-value products.
 Combining top-quality drinks with added extras underscores the premium nature of the products, and fits perfectly with one of the key current trends in the beverage market: on the one hand, consumers want healthy food, and on the other hand they are looking for interesting and unusual new taste experiences.
Natural pieces of real fruit or vegetables and grains are valuable not just as components of a balanced diet – they are also perceived and rated by consumers as added-value extras. In addition, drinks containing nutritious particulates have a special consistency and provide new, unusual drinking experiences and sensory satisfaction.

Set for global success
China's dairy industry is faced with the challenge of developing new product concepts that offer consumers genuine added value and product differentiation as well as the creation of additional benefits are critical for long-term market success. This is where the new product concept of UHT milk containing real particulates really made its mark. The country's two leading dairy enterprises, Inner Mongolia Mengniu Dairy and Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group, set the ball rolling with UHT milk drinks containing nata de coco and UHT milk containinAir Jordan