Cold-pressed juice,
pasteurised without heat

We make cold-pressed juice to order. You can specify the produce, the bottle and label are designed with you, and the kill step is HPP: pressure without heat, so flavour and heat-sensitive nutrients survive. From a flavour idea to a bottled product ready to list, every step in between is ours.

The cold-pressed juice we make for you

From a flavour idea to a bottled product ready to list, every step in between is ours. You can specify the produce, the bottle and label are designed with you, and the kill step is HPP, so the flavour survives.

• You can specify the produceBring specific produce for a custom requirement. The available range includes acerola, banana, apple, blackberry, mango and passion fruit among many tropical and temperate options.
• Bottle and label designed with youFrom label design to bottle selection, worked out together, with the pack validated for HPP pressure.
• Formulation and trial batchesSweetness, acidity, concentration and blend ratio tuned to your positioning
• HPP cold pasteurisationPressure at ambient temperature, so flavour and heat-sensitive nutrients survive
• Labelling and nutrition panelCalculated from actual testing, with the permitted claim range reviewed
• Cold chain and channel placementChilled storage, delivery and alignment with channel receiving specifications

Three routes, none of them free

Every cold-pressed juice has to settle its kill step before it ships, and each of the three options costs something different. The decision cannot be avoided, and it should not wait until the packaging is signed off.

No kill step keeps the flavour intact. The price is a shelf life measured in days, with the microbial risk resting entirely on the cold chain and on channel turnover. In practice only very short chains sustain it: own stores, same-day delivery.

Heat extends shelf life to weeks or more and leaves packaging free, glass included. The price is cooked character and the loss of heat-labile nutrients, which is precisely what cold pressing set out to preserve. Heat-treating a cold-pressed juice pays the cost of cold pressing without buying the result.

HPP keeps the flavour and the heat-labile compounds. The price is constrained packaging, high equipment cost, and a product that still needs an unbroken cold chain. It is not a better kill step. It is a different set of costs for a different result.

Packaging: choose it first, because it vetoes

HPP applies pressure after the pack is sealed, so the container has to take isostatic pressure, flex slightly and recover fully, with the seal holding through both compression and release.

The practical consequences are firm: glass is out, rigid plastics are mostly out, and packs with significant headspace are out. What works is generally flexible, with headspace minimised, and that in turn constrains the filling equipment and the fill volume.

For a brand this means the range of bottle shapes and materials narrows at the start of the project. A brand planning glass for its premium read has to rethink the visual strategy on this route, or accept a different kill step.

So packaging options are narrowed before sampling, not after a bottle design is approved and tooling ordered. What that step saves is the cost of new tooling, not a few days.

How shelf life is set, and why it cannot be copied

This is the most common misjudgement in a cold-pressed juice project: seeing a number on an HPP juice in the chiller and assuming it transfers. That number does not belong to the category. It belongs to that formula, that ingredient source and that pack.

What HPP achieves depends on four things: the pH and water activity of the formula, the incoming microbial load of the produce, the combination of pressure and hold time, and the barrier properties of the pack. The same parameters on two different formulas can give shelf lives that differ several-fold.

Variation on the raw material side is the part most often underestimated. The same produce carries very different starting counts across seasons, origins and pre-treatments, and the starting load drives what survives the process.

• Defined before the study startsSampling points, storage temperatures including deliberate abuse, test parameters, acceptance criteria
• Why it has to be defined firstA study designed after the fact produces data that cannot support a label claim
• Enzyme activity is watched tooSome enzymes are pressure-tolerant and can cause browning or flavour drift in storage

Produce varies more than expected

A large part of a cold-pressed juice is decided before the produce reaches the plant, not on the line. The same fruit or vegetable carries different sugar-acid ratios, pigment levels and starting microbial counts across seasons, origins and ripeness.

The sugar-acid ratio drives the first impression of flavour and also the pH, and pH in turn affects microbial stability after HPP. So changing an ingredient source changes more than the taste: it can change the shelf life.

Starting count matters even more directly. Field management, harvest method, transit time and pre-treatment such as washing, peeling and pre-cooling all move the incoming load, and HPP reduces a proportion rather than reaching an absolute. A high starting load leaves a high residue.

The practical answer is to write the produce specification into the document: variety, origin, sugar-acid range, acceptance criteria. That costs far less than correcting it on the line, and it is something a channel audit asks about.

The cold chain is part of the spec

What HPP extends is chilled shelf life. Every leg from plant to shelf has to stay chilled, and the channel separately sets a minimum remaining shelf life on arrival. Multiply the two and the window is narrow.

The arithmetic is direct: total shelf life minus the required remainder leaves the days in which production, warehousing, delivery and shelf placement must all happen. If the window is not wide enough the SKU cannot enter that channel, regardless of how good it is.

So a cold-pressed juice project brings channel and logistics in from day one. Reverse that order and the common outcome is a product only an owned channel can sell.

How the pressure is applied

At the heart of an HPP installation is a vessel built to hold extreme pressure. Product that is already packaged and sealed goes into the vessel, the vessel is filled with water, pumps raise the water pressure to the target, it is held for a set time, and then released.

Using water as the medium is the point. Liquids are almost incompressible, so pressure propagates through the whole vessel effectively instantly and arrives on the product from every direction at once, uniformly. This is called isostatic pressure: it has no direction.

Because it has no direction, the product is not crushed. A bottle of juice at 6,000 atmospheres does shrink slightly in volume, since water itself compresses by something in the low tens of percent at that pressure, but its shape does not change, and it recovers fully on release. What is actually tested is the packaging and the seal.

Why pressure kills microbes but spares vitamins

This is the least intuitive and most important thing about HPP. The answer is a difference of scale.

Microorganisms: they have structure to collapse

A microorganism is alive. It depends on a membrane to hold a concentration gradient, on the three-dimensional folding of proteins to run enzymatic reactions, on ribosomes to build protein. All of those are higher-order structures, held together by non-covalent interactions: hydrogen bonds, hydrophobic effects, ionic bonds.

Thousands of atmospheres compress the volume those structures occupy. The lipid bilayer of the membrane is disordered and loses selective permeability; protein folding is disrupted and enzymes lose activity. The organism can no longer sustain metabolism or reproduce.

The point is that none of this needs heat. Pressure works against structure, where heat works against chemical bonds.

Vitamins and flavour molecules: too small to collapse

Vitamin C, flavour compounds and pigments are orders of magnitude smaller than a protein, and their shape is set mainly by covalent bonds. Covalent bonds are largely unaffected in this pressure range.

In other words, they have no higher-order structure for pressure to collapse. The pressure passes through them and they come out essentially unchanged. That is why HPP can inactivate microorganisms and retain heat-labile compounds at the same time: pressure is selective, heat is not.

Thermal processing works the other way round. Heat damages the proteins of the microorganism and the heat-sensitive compounds in the product simultaneously, because both respond to temperature. That is why heat-treated juice necessarily loses some of its flavour and vitamin content.

Pressure works against structure; heat works against bonds. That one sentence explains every advantage HPP has and every limit it runs into.

Spores: where HPP stops

If pressure disrupts cell structure, why does HPP product still need refrigeration? Because one form of microbial life is nearly indifferent to pressure: the bacterial spore.

A spore is a dormant body some bacteria form when conditions turn hostile. Its water content is very low, it carries several protective outer layers, and the proteins inside are stabilised by specialised molecules. Those properties let it survive drying, heat and radiation, and also ambient-temperature pressure.

So ambient HPP alone cannot reach the commercial sterility that shelf-stable storage requires. Surviving spores will germinate into vegetative cells and multiply given the right conditions, and what suppresses that is low temperature.

The relationship between HPP and refrigeration is not belt and braces. It is a division of labour: HPP reduces the vegetative load, refrigeration suppresses germination and subsequent growth. The shelf life is the product of both. Remove either and the number does not hold.

What it suits and what it does not

HPP is not a universal process. The first question is water content: pressure needs a liquid medium, and if water activity is too low the pressure cannot act effectively on the microorganisms.

The second question is how much of the product’s value comes from not being heated. If it is meant to be cooked, caramelised or to carry roasted notes, HPP offers nothing while still costing packaging freedom and a cold chain.

Compared with thermal pasteurisation

Neither process is better than the other; they fit different products. The table sets the differences out item by item so that choosing between them becomes a matter of matching conditions rather than impressions.

Three things to redo after switching to HPP

If a product moves from thermal processing to HPP, three things cannot carry over from the old version. This matters because all three carry regulatory exposure.

One: the nutrition panel

Retention of heat-labile compounds differs between the HPP version and the thermal one. That is the whole point of the change. Since retention differs, the declared values have to come from testing the new process.

Carrying the old figures over is a common oversight, and it is simultaneously a mislabelling problem and a document-consistency problem: the specification, the label and the test report stop agreeing. Buyer audits and customs inspections both find it.

Two: shelf life and storage condition

The new process needs a new shelf-life study. And if the product was previously ambient, moving to HPP moves it to chilled, which is not only a label change: the supply chain and the channel strategy change with it.

Delivery freshness rules, home-delivery cost and which channels can carry it all become different. That arithmetic belongs before the decision to switch, not after.

Three: packaging and seal validation

Packaging that worked before may not work under HPP. Even where the material is viable, seal strength has to be revalidated, because the seal now takes stress in both directions, under compression and on release, not just the ordinary stress of storage and transit.

This is best run during the pilot with the actual pack, the actual fill volume and the actual pressure parameters, rather than extrapolated from lab-scale samples.