Storage Studies of Natural Vitamin C Enriched Jaggery

Jaggery is a natural sweetener with full of nutrition. To make it further nutritive, a process technology for production of value-added jaggery using aonla as a natural source of vitamin C has been developed at Indian Institute of Sugarcane Research, Lucknow. Jaggery thus produced contains substantial amount of vitamin C besides having good taste and palatability. In the present study, value-added jaggery and plain jaggery in bar shape were prepared using a suitable sugarcane variety. Samples were stored for 10 months from February to December in mini IISR jaggery drying-cum-storage bin and were analyzed at regular interval for quality parameters and for vitamin C content in value-added jaggery. During analysis, it was observed that there was similar pattern of increase/decrease in sucrose, reducing sugars, pH and colour in value-added jaggery and plain jaggery. Moisture content reduced during initial part (drying phase) and increased during monsoon period in both the cases. It was concluded that value-added jaggery behaves like plain jaggery. Loss of vitamin C was observed as 24.67 per cent during storage period in value-added jaggery.