PETpla.net Insider 05 / 2018

BOTTLING / FILLING PET planet Insider Vol. 19 No. 05/18 www.petpla.net 36 Aseptic line for Nectar in Serbia Fruitful investment Serbian fruit juice producer Nectar is raising the level of its technical equipment to totally unprecedented heights with a new aseptic ller from KHS. This is not only of benet to the quality of its products but also to its efciency in production. When Nectar started up its rst production line for processing fruit juice in beverage cartons 20 years ago near Novi Sad in the northwest of Serbia, there was no telling just how fast the company would develop. Five years later a factory for the production of fruit concentrates and purées was procured in Vladičin Han in the south of the country. In 2005 a PET, a glass and a canning line were added to the machine park, with new beverage carton lines following soon after. In 2008 Nectar became the majority owner of the Heba mineral water bottling plant in Bujano- vac, also in the south of Serbia, and since 2011 Nectar has owned Fructal, a Slovenian processor of fruit with over 70 years of tradition under its belt. Nectar is now a veritable model company as demonstrated among other things by it being awarded the title of best corporate brand in Serbia in 2013. No competitor covers all stages of the value chain as thoroughly as Nectar: from its own plantations through purchasing, fruit processing and cooperation with fruit farmers to the nished product. Its high standards are expressed by the Serbian ‘nije svejedno’ which trans- lates into English as ‘it does matter’. The company, famous well beyond the Balkan region, makes good use of this slogan and its marketing cam- paign emotionally explains that it does matter what we drink and what we look forward to. As one would therefore expect, great attention is paid to product quality and food safety here. Until very recently sensitive products were pasteurised and lled with the help of ultraclean lling technology (UCF), where overpressure is applied to the lling and capping zone. The air is fed in through lters to prevent any possible microbiological contamina- tion. In addition, the empty bottles are rst lled with nitrogen to improve the microbiological quality of the lling pro- cess. In order to satisfy its own grow- ing demand for quality, Nectar has now opted for aseptic lling. This allows its range of products to be considerably expanded – both with regard to the fruit content and the various avours and product variants in all categories. “For us, the most important thing is that we can now carry out this process under sterile conditions,” smiles produc- tion manager Milka Tomanović. “This retains the natural properties of the fruit. We have a better quality of nal product and can offer greater microbio- logical quality over a longer period.” Safety rst Creating sterile conditions for asep- tic llers is a tricky undertaking. It was thus soon clear to Nectar that the only technological partners to come into question were certied systems manu- facturers proven worldwide. “Not only was the high quality of the components Nectar offers its customers a wide range of top-quality fruit beverages, one of them being the BUZZZ brand which is lled on the new aseptic line from KHS. The new PET bottle design for BUZZZ was developed by Nectar in close coop- eration with the experts from the Bottles & Shapes program at KHS.