PUMPKIN PUREE PERFECTION IN EVERY PIE
Votator® II Scraped Surface Heat Exchanger
The Waukesha Cherry-Burrell® Votator® II 6x72 Scraped Surface Heat Exchanger helps a leading pumpkin pie manufacturer improve the heating and cooling of pre-frozen pumpkin puree—restoring consistency, enhancing stability and enabling clean, efficient production with strong results.
Challenge
The pumpkin supplier’s traditional method of heating and then freezing pumpkin puree for shipment from the farm produced a product unsuitable for ready-to-use applications. Once thawed, the puree showed poor consistency—grainy texture, low viscosity, phase separation, and an overly runny appearance—even before spices, sugar and other final ingredients were added. During pie crust filling and conveyor transfer to the spiral freezer, excessive spillage occurred due to product instability, preventing the operation from meeting quality standards. To stabilize the puree and reliably meet production requirements, the customer turned to ITT Flow Technologies.
Solution
ITT Flow Technologies recommended a hybrid system combining Votator II Scraped-Surface Heat Exchangers (SSHE) and tubular technology to efficiently reheat, pre-cool and final-cool the puree. The process included steam reheating via SSHE, tower-water pre-cooling through a jacketed tube-in-tube exchanger and ammonia final cooling through SSHE to maintain product quality throughout production. Our Application Engineering team sized and selected the optimal configuration based on product characteristics, process parameters and system design needs.
Result
By reprocessing the puree to recombine the pumpkin fiber and water phases, ITT Flow Technologies delivered a homogeneous, creamy product that could be cleanly deposited into pie crusts and withstand conveying and packaging. Today, the ITT Flow Technologies heat-exchanger solution has stabilized puree consistency, increased system output and reduced waste—creating a more efficient and reliable production process
Download PDF