Apple Processing

How is apple juice made?

Just like apples for apple sauce, Mott's® growers deliver apples for juice during the harvest season. These apples are graded to be sure they meet Mott's high-quality standards and the apples are then delivered to the Mott's plants for pressing.

Before pressing, the apples are conveyed into the plant and washed by very rigorous washers. From the washers, the apples are chopped up by a "hammer mill" and turned into an apple mash. The mash is then sent to hydraulic presses that squeeze the mash to extract the apple juice. The apple juice is then pumped to holding tanks.

From the holding tanks, the juice is pumped to filters to remove apple sediment. The juice then goes to one of two places:

  1. Directly to the bottling line — it is pasteurized and filled in bottles and cooled.
  2. The apple juice is sent to concentrators where much of the water is removed to make the product thick. The resulting concentrate is then stored cold in sanitized stainless steel tanks to wait to be bottled at another time.

How is apple sauce made?

Mott's apple sauce is produced year round from a special blend of apple varieties that give Mott's apple sauce its great flavor. In the fall or harvest season, Mott's apple growers deliver their apples in large wooden crates to our manufacturing plants. The grower's apples are graded to be sure they meet Mott's high-quality standards and then the apples go directly to the Mott's plants or are placed in specially designed cold storage so that the apples are available during any month of the year.

When apple sauce is made, apples are delivered to the Mott's plants from the farm or storage and then unloaded on to conveyors to go inside the plants. From the conveyors the apples go through very rigorous washers to be cleaned. From there, the apples travel by conveyors and water flumes to specially designed machines that remove the peel, core and seeds of the apple. What is left of the apple is the white flesh or meat. This flesh is then chopped up into small chunks and cooked by steam to finish the process.

Mott's makes many different types of apple sauce. Some examples include Chunky, Cinnamon, Strawberry and Mango-Peach. To make these products, additional ingredients are added to the natural apple sauce after the cooking process.

Glass jars or single-serve plastic cups are then filled with the hot apple sauce, sealed, cooled, labeled, packaged and shipped from our warehouse to local supermarkets in all areas of the United States and Canada.