MICROBIOLOGICAL QUALITY OF INDUSTRIALLY PROCESSED ORANGE FRUIT JUICES.

INTRODUCTION

Fruit juices are very nutritive, invigorating and non-alcoholic beverage, which is very well liked throughout the world. Juice may be squeezed directly from fruits or may be extracted by water. These juices can be used in their natural concentrations or in processed form. They are very scrumptious and palatable and they have most of the minerals necessary for growth and development, like calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, and sodium and vitamins especially vitamin C (Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 1999). However, these processed juices contain mainly water, sugar, preservatives, colour, fruits pulps and other additives as ingredients and must maintain sanitary standard (Doyle et al., 2001). The most commonly used preservatives are benzoic acid, sorbic acid, or sulphur dioxide (Nahar et al., 2006). Natural colours such as anthocynins and betanin are used (Wareing and Dvenport, 2005). Acid is an essential universal constitution of fruit drinks (Renard, 2008). The most commonly used acid is citric acid.