Design of conceptual citrus fruit juicer for hawkers in India

Healthy diet plays an important role in maintaining good health. Fruits and vegetables are naturally available resources and healthy food supplements for human consumption. In developing countries like India, street vendor's supplies fruit juices for low and middle class people at affordable price. Due to economic growth and changing lifestyle there is an increase in consumption of fruit juice in India. Consequently, there is a need to provide a hygienic street vended fruit juice which satisfies both consumer and hawkers. There is a lot of scope to introduce a manual juicer which is safe to drink and easy to maintain.

Data collection was carried out by various research methods and analyzed. It was seen that there is increase in juice consumption in India as people are more health conscious. Auger type juicer is highly efficient and as high nutritional value from extracted juice when compared to other type of juicer. From user study it was concluded that periodic cleaning of juicer was of prime importance in maintaining hygiene, as fermentation starts after two hours if juicer is not used continuously. Due to complex product structure the user hesitates to clean the juicer during the day and it takes long time for cleaning the juicer. Dust and debris are the main contaminants on the collected juice as it is placed in an open environment. From the identified needs QFD was developed and the main priorities should considered are mechanism, material, ergonomics and form. From the QFD, Product Design Specification (PDS) was made. Concepts were generated by solving issues like cleaning, hygienic, assembly and disassembly.

Final concept was selected using Pugh selection method by evaluating all the concepts with datum product. A 1: 1 mock up model had been made to validate the concept and feedback was collected from users. From simulation, the proposed concept mock-up was found to have saving of over 50% time for cleaning compared to conventional juicer. It is thus surmised that the proposed concept is likely to be a superior substitute for the existing ones in terms of maintenance and hygienic issues.