Forsythia Drying

1、 Customer background

The Chinese Herbal Medicine Planting Cooperative is located in Fan Zong, the main production area of Forsythia suspensa in Shanxi Province. It has a 300 acre planting base for Qingqiao and harvests about 800 tons of fresh Qingqiao annually. In the past, the traditional method of natural drying and oven drying faced three major pain points: unstable quality, up to 20% loss due to mold growth on rainy days, blackening of color, and severe loss of medicinal ingredients. High energy consumption cost: Drying coal in a clay furnace consumes a lot, the temperature is difficult to control accurately, and the drying is uneven. Insufficient production capacity: The traditional daily processing capacity is only 5 tons, which cannot meet the processing needs during the centralized harvesting period.

2、 Equipment selection and solutions

In 2024, after multiple investigations, the cooperative finally chose Jinlu Machinery’s medium-sized heat pump drying room to match the processing needs of Qingqiao: Equipment configuration:

Model: JL-1000G heat pump drying room (daily processing of 10 tons of fresh green tea); Temperature control system: precise adjustment between 20-65 ℃, suitable for gradient drying needs after withering of green tea leaves; Intelligent dehumidification: automatically sensing humidity to avoid fruit cracking caused by excessive drying; Process optimization: Steam withering pretreatment: Steam withering at 100 ℃ for 3 minutes to lock in the activity of Forsythia suspensa glycosides, resulting in a vibrant green color

Three stage drying:

Initial drying (60 ℃, 2 hours): rapid dehydration and shaping; Medium drying (55 ℃, 10 hours): uniform drying, retaining effective ingredients; Final drying (50 ℃, 2 hours): Low temperature finishing to reduce fruit breakage rate.

3、 Customer feedback

The drying room of Jinlu Machinery is easy to operate, with precise temperature control, so you no longer have to worry about mold growth on rainy days. This year, our dried green tea was directly sold by the pharmaceutical factory, with a price 2.8 yuan/kg higher than the market average! “- Manager Wang, the person in charge of the cooperative. Jinlu Machinery provides full technical support from equipment selection to process debugging, helping cooperatives achieve a leap from “relying on the sky for food” to “standardized production”.