04 December 2009
	REAL PEOPLE DOING UNREAL THINGS Burst of citrus sells By Jacqui Pile

It's a long way from being a lawyer and corporate banker to selling cryogenically frozen lemon cells to the Japanese. But entrepreneur Adrian Vardy has made the transition from corporate suit to factory floor with ease. Vardy first made the move into the food industry when he was part of a consortium that bought and listed Sovereign Foods in the early 1990s. After helping start a milling business, his attention was attracted when the Eastern Cape Development Agency began looking for investors for Dynamic Commodities, a Port Elizabeth-based fruit-processing company. He is now the majority shareholder and CEO of the company. For the past five years, the company's product development team, guided by company founder Manie Maritz, have been refining a technique to freeze the tiny juice pods of lemons, oranges and grapefruit. After years of research, the company launched its product at the Anuga food festival this year in Cologne, Germany, where, to the company's surprise, it took the prize in the innovation category. The product, Bits o' Juice, is manufactured at the company's factory in the Coega Industrial Development Zone where the company has 630 employees. The process involves peeling lemons and separating the segments by hand, after which they are frozen at very low temperatures with liquid nitrogen and then smashed. "What remains are the cells which look something like rice," says Vardy. These are then packed into punnets and exported. "It's an elegant and innovative substitute for conventional hand-squeezed lemon pods," he says. When the pods thaw, they present a burst of pure lemon juice that hasn't been affected by industrial processes and isn't tainted by the pith or membrane that holds the pods together. Dynamic Commodities is already exporting hundreds of tons of Bits o' Juice to Japan every month. In the catering industry, it's used as a topping on dishes such as fish as it doesn't make the food soggy. "The cells burst only when they hit your tongue," he says. A Japanese beverages company will also use Bits o' Juice in a vodka-like beverage it produces. "Unlike fresh fruit juices where the fruit cells you're tasting are actually the spent sac, with Bits o' Juice, the sac remains intact so it's ideal for beverages," says Vardy. The innovation was a natural progression for Dynamic Commodities, which started out selling frozen fruit shells to the Japanese market. The company then extended its product range by filling the fruit shells with sorbet and marketing them in the US and Europe. It now ships 3m fruit sorbets a month to the US alone. Following the success of its Island Way sorbet brand, the company began producing frozen citrus segments, from oranges and grapefruit. "Though fruit can be preserved in cans, the process involves cooking and preserving the segments in a sugary liquid, which destroys the natural flavour profile," says Vardy. "We found customers were demanding a natural alternative. Freezing segments was one way of doing this." The same freezing technique was used to freeze piquant peppers, of which the company now sells 200 t/year. "The conventional method for preparing piquant peppers is to cook them in a sugar and vinegar brine and preserve them with preservatives or through cooking," says Vardy. "But this leaves them soft, sticky and flaky." By freezing them, the peppers retain their natural shape, texture and flavour. "Companies overseas like them because they're able to stuff them with interesting fillings," he says. About 96% of the company's product is exported and the company processes tens of millions of tons of fruit a year.