Technological Interventions in the Production of Sugarcane Juice Concentrates

India is producing surplus amounts of sugarcane and sugar. Over the past few years, India has produced more than 300 million tonnes of sugarcane from about five million ha of land with an average yield of around 75 t/ha and a sugar recovery rate of around 10.0%. India requires 25.0 MT of sugar every year for its domestic consumption. In recent years, India has produced nearly 10.0 million tonnes of excess sugar, which needs to be diverted for the protection of the livelihood of sugarcane farmers, safety of sugar mills and stability of the sugar market. Therefore, diversifying cane juice is inevitable and product diversification is very much needed for efficient use of the produce and to generate more income. Sugarcane juice, as an energy drink with health benefits, offers tremendous opportunities for value addition and product diversification. Hence, it is highly important to explore ways of converting sugarcane juice into new value-added products by employing advanced juice concentration technologies. Therefore, this chapter aims to review the recent advances in sugarcane juice concentrates and the new processes for converting the juice into value-added products. Technologies for the production of new concentrated products from sugarcane juice, namely sugarcane juice powder using spray drying and freeze-drying technologies, jams, jellies, gummies, candies and jaggery and its formulations, and advances in membrane filtration research for concentrating sugarcane juice have been discussed in this chapter. This chapter also discusses optimization of the processing parameters for developing these products. Nutritional benefits and commercial applications of sugarcane juice-based value-added products have been thoroughly reviewed in this chapter. This would help the readers and stakeholders enrich their knowledge of sugarcane juice concentrates. This would also provide enormous opportunities for young entrepreneurs and the food processing sector to explore the potential of sugarcane juice for commercial applications.