Health conscious consumers and soft drink enthusiasts will soon have an alternative in the processed tender coconut water that entrepreneur M.N. Varadarajan has managed to produce.
With the help of the Directorate of Agri Business Development of the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University he has processed tender coconut water to give it a shelf life of a year when stored in the right temperature. Mr. Varadarajan says his non-thermal processing technique controls microbial activity to increase shelf life while retaining all that is natural in coconut water.
The University Vice-Chancellor K. Ramasamy says that the product is natural as nothing is added.
It took more than a year-and-a-half for Mr. Varadarajan and his wife Sujatha to come out with product ‘Coco Fresh’. They spent the first six months of 2014-15 to come out with a raw product and the next 12 months to fine tune it based on suggestions from consumers and inputs from experts in the University.
Mr. Varadarajan says that most of it was spent in arriving at the right process as he had to preserve the nature of tender coconut water.
He did not opt for Pasteurisation, as few others in the market did, because it altered its nature.
The University supported by providing a sterile environment and eliminating microbial activity because a microbe-free product was important for long shelf life, says R. Murugesan, Director, Agri Business Development.
The ideal plant that Mr. Varadarajan has conceived requires 5,000 tender coconuts a day. At an average of 250 ml a coconut, the plant will produce 1,250 litres processed tender coconut water a day. There will be direct employment to 10 persons and indirect employment to around 50 people, who will work in farms that supply coconut.
This will help coconut farmers get a steady income, Mr. Ramasamy adds.
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