Does Pasteurisation Reduce Nutrients in Sea Buckthorn Juice?

Pasteurisation does reduce some nutrients in sea buckthorn juice, particularly vitamin C. It also makes the juice safe and gives it a shelf life. Both things are true, and any brand that tells you only one of them is being selective.

What pasteurisation is

Heating a liquid to a set temperature for a set time to kill microorganisms that would otherwise spoil it or make people ill. It is one of the most consequential public health measures in food history.

For any juice sold in bottles and stored at room temperature before opening, some form of heat treatment is standard. The alternative is a product with a very short life that must be kept cold from press to glass.

What heat costs

Vitamin C

The most heat-sensitive nutrient in the fruit, and the one most affected. How much is lost depends on temperature and time.

Some antioxidants

Certain compounds degrade with heat. Others are more stable, and some become more available after heating — the picture is not uniformly negative.

Carotenoids and minerals

Relatively stable. The orange colour is not the fragile part.

Why it is still done

Because the alternative is worse. An unpasteurised juice sitting in a warm Indian supply chain is a genuine safety risk, and food-borne illness is a real cost against a marginal nutritional gain.

The question worth asking is not whether a juice was heat treated but how carefully — and that is where brands differ.

What actually separates products

Temperature and duration matter more than the fact of pasteurisation. Gentler treatment retains more.

How many times the juice is heated matters too. Fruit that is heated to make concentrate, then reconstituted, then pasteurised again, has been through it more than once. This is one reason "not from concentrate" is a meaningful phrase.

And time between harvest and processing matters more than either. Sea buckthorn begins losing nutritional value as soon as it leaves the branch. Fruit pressed close to where it grew starts from a higher point than fruit that travelled for days.

Being straightforward about our own

Our juices are heat treated, because bottled juice sold across India has to be. We do not claim otherwise, and a brand claiming a room-temperature-stable juice with zero heat treatment is describing something that does not work.

What we can point to is the rest of the chain: Ladakhi fruit, processing under WHO-GMP certified manufacturing, and batch testing at a NABL-accredited laboratory. No added sugar, colours, flavours or sweeteners.

How to think about it as a buyer

Do not chase an unpasteurised product; it is not the marker of quality it appears to be. Look instead at sourcing, at whether the juice is from concentrate, at the ingredient list, and at whether anyone independent has tested it.

The full version of that reasoning is in how to choose a genuine juice.