Public awareness in maintaining health is increasing in this modern era. This is marked by increase in consumer attention to healthy food and beverage products. Fruit juice is one of the best beverage choices for health because it contains numerous content of vitamins, antioxidants, and minerals. Pineapple juice is one of the products that has a potential to be developed in Indonesia because of its abundant resources. However, pineapple juice has fairly high level of sour taste that is less accepted by consumers in general. To solve this problem, a process to remove acid compounds or deacidification becomes the solution. Deacidification methods through adding sugar, dilution, and precipitation to ion exchange have been developed. These methods have not been able to produce the products according to people’s demands yet, therefore technology for deacidification with membrane is present, namely electrodialysis (ED).
Electrodialysis method is selected as it does not significantly change sensory and nutritional quality of the products. However, the amount of the contained acid cannot be set aside optimally because electrodialysis performance is limited by decrease in feed conductivity. Development of electrodeionization membrane (EDI) is investigated in this study. EDI optimum operating conditions in deacidification process, such as flow rate and feed concentration, as well as voltage difference were determined. Product quality, pH, dissolved solids (% brix), and sensory (sweet taste, acid, bitter, color, and aroma) were investigated in this study.
Contact Person:
Helen Julian, Ph.D. (helen@che.itb.ac.id)