Banana Puree is usually made from reject or cull bananas which cannot be sold as fresh fruit. The bananas come from the ripening rooms to the washing, sorting and peeling operation prior to entering the continuous aseptic process. The process equipment is presterilized with pressurized hot water while the aseptic fillers are being sterilized with steam. The product flows from the banana finisher to a homogenizer to break up the particles prior to deaeration. This allows the highly efficient centrifugal deaerator to remove entrained air. Both the deaerator and product surge tank are run under vacuum to protect the bananas from discoloring. The surge tank is unloaded with a WCB positive displacement pump which provides stuffing pressure to the WCB high pressure piston timing pump. The WCB scraped surface heat exchangers utilize special mutator shafts to prevent banana discoloration during the heating and cooling steps. The product is heated to 270° F prior to the holding tube. After holding, product is cooled in scraped surface heat exchangers using a combination of tower and chilled water as the cooling media. The process can be supplied with an essence recovery and injection system