Apple cider packaging bags award

Thursday, March 7, 2013

by SUSAN MANN

Two brothers have bagged more than apple cider after winning an agricultural industry award last month for innovative packaging of their product.

Garry and Gord Geissberger of Mitchell’s Corners, located east of Oshawa, have won the 2013 Food Innovation Award from the Ontario Farm Fresh Marketing Association and Foodland Ontario. The operators of Geissberger Farmhouse Cider were presented with the award at the association’s gala in Niagara Falls last month.

The makers of Bag-in-Box Sweet Apple Cider were recognized for their bag-in-the-box packaging that keeps apple cider fresh for a up to year unopened without the use of preservatives or refrigeration. Garry says the packaging is very similar to what the wine industry uses. It’s a plastic bag with a spout that sits inside a cardboard box.

After the cider is opened, it stays fresh for up to three months.

“The key to the whole thing is when you start to use it air doesn’t get into the bag because the bag will collapse as you use it,” Garry explains.

After using the same cider press for the past 42 years, made by a relative of the Geisssbergers’ grandfather, Hans, the brothers decided to buy a new press last year. They found a mobile cider press in British Columbia that uses the bag-in-box packaging.

“We were really concerned that it maintained the integrity of the product, flavour and that sort of thing,” Garry recalls. After receiving a sample they were happy with it.

Garry, a part-time teacher, says there are three of the units in use in British Columbia but they likely have the only one in Ontario. They started using it in October.

The press sits on a nine-foot by 23-foot trailer and can be towed by truck to different apple orchards so they can do custom pressing for growers. They can do this “as long as they (the growers) have a fairly level piece of ground, a potable water source and someone there to bring the bins of apples in and take the apple pulp away,” he says. The Geissbergers do the pressing and the growers keep the cider.

Everything needed to press the apples and come out with cider is contained in the unit. The apples go in one end and move up an elevator to the washer and then the chopper. The chopped apples get pumped through a line to the press, where they are pressed and then the product flows into the heat pasteurizer where it’s pasteurized at 77 degrees Celsius for a few seconds. “From there it goes into the bag-in-box,” he says.

Previously, they used ultra-violet pasteurization and they froze the apple cider because they didn’t want to use preservatives. But now they don’t have to do that.

About the award, Garry says they were “honoured, thrilled, amazed. Gosh there are a lot of adjectives you could use.” BF