Featured Vegetable Product: Celery juice concentrate

Celery is one of the highest natural vegetable sources for B vitamins and provides a nutritious and flavorful vegetable ingredient for a wide variety of food and beverage products. Celery is also a great source of minerals potassium, magnesium, iron, phosphorus, sodium and essential amino acids. Natural sodium from celery is safer than iodised commercial sodium, which is harmful to those with high blood pressure. The minerals in celery help to balance the blood pH and neutralize acidity.

Celery is part of the Umbelliferae family, similar to parsley and fennel. Celery contains high concentrations of 8 important classes of cancer fighting compounds, including Acetylenics, Phenolic Acids and Coumarins, which are known to act against colon and stomach cancers.

Celery is also reported to provide the following health benefits:

• Help with lowering blood pressure
• Acting as a diuretic
• Provides anti-inflammatory properties
• Acts as a natural laxative
• aids in the reduction of total and LDL cholesterol

Encore Fruit Marketing can provide an excellent source of this product to help consumer products deliver one of the 5 A Day vegetable servings.

It is carefully processed from fresh, washed vegetable to provide the essential nutrition and flavor, in a convenient, ready to use ingredient form. This product is an excellent ingredient to add a vegetable serving your retail label for beverages, yogurts, nutrition bars and snacks and other processed foods.

Contact Encore Fruit Marketing today for your sample and information on Celery juice concentrate at www.encorefruit.com, or e mail sales@encorefruit.com.

The name celery retraces the plant's route of successive adoption in European cooking, as the English celery (1664) is derived from the French céleri coming from the Lombard term, seleri, from the Latin selinon, borrowed from Greek. Celery's Mediterranean origins are still commemorated in the French expression céleri d'Italie.

The plants are raised from seed, sown either in a hot bed or in the open garden according to the season of the year, and after one or two thinnings out and transplantings they are, on attaining a height of 15-20 cm, planted out in deep trenches for convenience of blanching, which is affected by earthing up to exclude light from the stems.

Contact Encore Fruit Marketing today for product samples and information at sales@encorefruit.com