May 19, 2022

In 1970 a grad student by the name of Lopez, at a Puerto Rican university, developed the process for producing cream of coconut from the white meat in a coconut. He used a Vincent 6” screw press. This gave birth to an industry which today circles the globe.

In Sri Lanka there are about ten mid-size firms each running 50,000 to 100,000 coconuts per day. Some use the name Coco Lopez to describe cream of coconut which they produce. These firms are larger than processors in the Dominican Republic, where they typically run 20,000 to 50,000 nuts per day. However, there are no big processors like they have in the Philippines, where typically they run 300,000 to 800,000 coconuts per day.

The Sri Lankans produce a very wide range of products from their coconuts. Press liquor (Coco Lopez, coconut milk, cream of coconut, cococream) is canned and pasteurized. Alternatively, cold pressed coconut oil can be separated from the press liquor. There is also spray dried coconut cream, in powder form, being sold. Coconut water is recovered; some of it is sweetened to a higher Brix, to improve the taste. Concentrated coconut cream is made using Alfa Laval plate & frame evaporators, driven by steam. Some companies even produce snack foods using coconut flour. All of these products are available with the optional “organic” label.

The yield (or recovery) of coconut cream in Sri Lanka is much higher than is seen in the Philippines. 65% to 70% is common in Sri Lanka, compared to 45% to 55% in the Philippines. This is at least partly due to blanching the meat at 80C to 90C temperature ahead of the screw presses.

The press cake left over after pressing is made into low fat desiccated coconut (DC). We can only conclude that the Philippine low fat DC has more fat in it than does the Sri Lankan.

(High fat DC is made from shredded coconut meat which has not been pressed for oil recovery.)

Much of the cream of coconut produced in Sri Lanka is used to produce cold pressed coconut oil. Centrifuges are used to separate this oil from the coconut cream. Recently the popularity of cold pressed coconut oil has increased significantly.

The brown coconut peel and trim rejects are supplied to alternate processors. These dry this waste into copra, which is used in the production of virgin coconut oil. (The same practice is followed in the Dominican Republic.)

Note that traditional virgin coconut oil is expelled from copra (dried coconut meat). Vincent is not involved in that process. It requires that the fat in the copra be squeezed hard enough for it to flow out as liquid oil. Anderson International pioneered the expellers used for this purpose.

Typical of the industry world-wide, the coconuts (frequently referred to simply as nuts) arrive at the plant with the husks having been removed at the plantation. The outer brown shells are removed by pressing them, hand held, against high speed rotating snag-tooth drums. The drums are narrower in Sri Lanka than those we have seen in the Philippines. This contrasts to the use of machetes in the Dominican Republic. (We have also seen processing in the Dominican Republic which involves blanching the entire nut, on trays in canned food pasteurizers, followed by spooning the softened meat out from the shells.)

After shelling, the kernel is the part that is left. The norm in Sri Lanka is to peel the brown skin from the kernel. This is in contrast to shredding and processing the entire kernel, sometimes done in the Dominican Republic.

After shelling and peeling, the nuts are washed in a communal bath. Next these kernels are broken open to recover the coconut water. This is in contrast to some processors elsewhere who drill two 1/2″ holes through the ends of the nut, ahead of shelling, for recovery of coconut water.

The next steps are to blanch, shred, and run the meat through a screw press. Single pressing of the meat is used in Sri Lanka and the Philippines, in contrast to triple pressing in the Dominican Republic.

All but two of the Sri Lankan processors use Bepex (Rietz) presses, or local Wanigasekara presses which show evolutionary development from the Rietz machines. An exception to this is our customer, who uses modern Vincent screw presses. And there is one processor who uses belt presses for expelling the cream of coconut.

It must be assumed that the Bepex (Rietz) presses are quite dated. The original RSP (Rietz Screw Press) presses were made to Vincent’s VP drawings, which we supplied under a technical license in the 1970’s.

As with processors world-wide, the shells are used as boiler fuel.

Coir is one of the products made from coconut husk. This involves an entirely different customer grouping.

ISSUE #342