Site Planning
Installation & Commissioning
Automatic & Efficient
Client Name： C****L Cítricos Cooperativa
Country： Kingdom of Spain
Region： Region of Murcia - the largest lemon and citrus producing area in Europe, known as the "Orchard of Europe"
Core Products： Frozen lemon slices, dehydrated lemon slices, lemon slices for beverages, ready-to-drink tea ingredients, lemon slices for essence raw materials
Equipment Configuration： Hadof customized high-speed lemon slicing production line (including automatic cleaning and grading system, precision thickness-setting slicing unit, online color protection and low-temperature drying connection module)
Commissioning Time： Q4 2020
Spain is a leading global lemon producer. Lemons from the Murcia region are famous for their rich aroma, balanced acidity and regular shape. C****L Group is a long-established citrus cooperative in the region with more than 500 farmer members, and its products have long supplied the European fresh fruit market. With the rapid growth of the high-end beverage, ready-to-drink tea and frozen fruit markets, the cooperative decided to invest in building a lemon deep-processing production line to transform from fresh fruit export to high value-added ingredient supply.
Core challenges in lemon slicing:
Complex shape and structure: Lemons are oval with thick peels containing oil cells and juicy pulp. Traditional manual slicing is difficult to ensure uniform thickness, and easily causes juice loss, affecting the appearance and flavor retention of finished products.
Severe oxidation and browning: After slicing, lemon pulp is exposed to air and oxidizes rapidly, causing surface browning, which seriously affects the color of frozen or dehydrated slices, leading to a rejection rate of up to 10% by high-end European customers.
Prominent production capacity bottleneck: More than 50 tons of fresh lemons need to be processed every day in peak season. Manual slicing requires more than 200 skilled workers working in shifts, which still cannot meet the order delivery time of European beverage enterprises.
Sanitation and foreign body risks: Many manual contact links, essential oil residues on peels easily lead to microbial growth, and seed fragments are difficult to completely remove, restricting products from entering large beverage supply chains.
Based on the characteristics of lemon with high acidity, juiciness, irregular shape and easy browning, Hadof team customized a fully automatic lemon slicing production line for C****L Group:
1. Intelligent Grading and Directional Cutting System
The front-end adopts a visual recognition grading system to divide fruits into three grades: large, medium and small according to diameter, which enter the slicing channels of corresponding specifications respectively. The directional cutting device ensures that lemons enter the slicing station in the best posture, making the slices regular and round, meeting the aesthetic requirements of high-end beverages for decorative slices.
2. High-precision Anti-juice Loss Slicing Unit
The blade adopts ultra-thin stainless steel circular knife, combined with high-speed rotation and precise feeding to realize instant cutting, minimizing juice loss and pulp extrusion. The thickness adjustment range is 2mm-8mm, and the deviation is controlled within ±0.3mm, ensuring consistent slice thickness for subsequent freezing or drying. The blade surface is treated with Teflon coating to prevent fruit acid corrosion and pulp adhesion.
3. Online Color Protection and Rapid Cooling System
After slicing, it immediately enters the vitamin C solution atomization color protection section, and antioxidant is sprayed evenly to effectively inhibit browning. Then it is rapidly cooled by low-temperature air flow to reduce the slice temperature below 5℃, locking the aroma and color. The whole process from slicing to entering the quick-freeze tunnel is controlled within 60 seconds, and the oxidation browning rate is reduced from 8% to less than 1%.
4. Intelligent Color Sorting and Foreign Body Removal
Equipped with a high-speed visual color sorting system, it automatically identifies and removes browned slices, seed residues, fruit stems and foreign bodies, with a sorting accuracy of 99.7%. Qualified products are automatically graded according to thickness and specifications, and connected to quick-freeze tunnels, vacuum dryers or direct packaging respectively, realizing full-process automation.
5. Hygienic Design and Easy-to-clean Structure
The whole line adopts 304 stainless steel fully enclosed structure, all contact surfaces are designed with rounded corners, no sanitary dead corners, supporting CIP in-situ cleaning. Key components can be quickly disassembled to meet the highest requirements of BRC and IFS international food standards for ready-to-eat ingredient processing.
Client Testimonial: From Fresh Fruit Cooperative to Core Supplier of European Beverage Ingredients
Since the full operation of the new line in 2021, C****L Group has achieved a qualitative leap:
Capacity and Efficiency
Daily processing capacity: increased from less than 15 tons of manual slicing to 45 tons per shift, and up to 70 tons per day at full capacity, becoming one of the largest lemon slicing processing bases in Spain.
Labor optimization: The number of workers in the slicing section has been reduced from 200 to 12 technicians, labor costs reduced by more than 90%, completely solving the problem of seasonal recruitment.
Quality and Market
Finished product qualification rate: slice thickness consistency reaches more than 99%, debris rate reduced to less than 2%, products with bright color and rich aroma, European customer rejection rate reduced from 10% to less than 0.5%.
Market expansion: Passed BRC, IFS and organic certifications, successfully entered the ready-to-drink ingredient supply chains of many well-known European beverage brands (such as Fever-Tree, Schweppes) and supermarket chains (such as Mercadona, Carrefour). The export volume of deep-processed products accounts for 45% of the cooperative's total revenue, up from 8%.
Comprehensive Benefits
Raw material utilization rate: Through precise grading slicing and intelligent sorting, the comprehensive raw material utilization rate increased from 84% to 95%, saving more than 600,000 euros in annual lemon raw material costs.
Energy consumption optimization: The whole line adopts high-efficiency variable frequency motors and waste heat recovery systems, the unit output power consumption is reduced by 22% compared with traditional split equipment, and won the special award for green manufacturing from the Spanish Ministry of Industry.
"Hadof's lemon slicing line has enabled us to move from traditional fresh fruit export to high value-added ingredient processing. Now, every lemon slice enters the production lines of top European beverage brands with precise thickness and bright color, and the farmers of our cooperative also share the added value benefits brought by deep processing. This is a model of industrial upgrading."
—— C****L Cítricos Cooperativa, Operations Director Mr. Fernández
