Estimation of the fruit juice content in soft drinks and other non-alcoholic beverages using the calculation developed by the Society of German Chemists (GDCh)
This method is suitable for soft drinks and other non-alcoholic beverages.
The fruit juice content of beverages and soft drinks is a very important quality characteristic. In Germany, there are guidelines that define the amount of juice contained in fruit-based beverages and soft drinks.
The guidelines specify that beverages made with fruit juice from seeded fruits or grapes must contain a minimum of 30 % juice, while those made from citrus fruits must contain at least 6 %, and beverages made from all other fruits or fruit combinations must contain at least 10 % juice. At least half of the juice content specified for fruit-based beverages must be present in fruit-flavored soft drinks.
Under special conditions, a high fruit juice content can also be determined. In order to evaluate these conditions, equations for calculating the juice content have been developed by the working group for fruit juices and fruit-flavored beverages within the Society of German Chemists.
The RSK values serve as the basis for the calculation and are used to aid in the evaluation for evaluating the authenticity of fruit juices and products made from them (the values are not legal standards).
The different levels of importance attributed to individual analytes and, in part, the large range of fluctuation typical of certain values, were taken into account by assigning a weight to the value for each analyte in the equation.