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Citric acid is a weak organic acid found in citrus fruits. It is a natural preservative and is also used to add an acidic (sour) taste to foods and soft drinks. Citric acid is a commodity chemical, and more than a million tonnes are produced every year by fermentation. It is used mainly as an acidifier, as a flavoring, and as a chelating agent. Although citric acid is found in high concentrations in many citrus fruits, it is not economical to extract the acid from fruit for industrial use. Furthermore, the demand for citric acid far outweighs the supply of citrus fruit available. The discovery of citric acid has been credited to the 8th century alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber).Medieval scholars in Europe were aware of the acidic nature of lemon and lime juices; such knowledge is recorded in the 13th century encyclopedia Speculum Maius (The Great Mirror), compiled by Vincent of Beauvais.Citric acid was first isolated in 1784 by the chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who crystallized it from lemon juice.Industrial-scale citric acid production began in 1890 based on the Italian citrus fruit industry. In 1893, C. Wehmer discovered Penicillium mold could produce citric acid from sugar. However, microbial production of citric acid did not become industrially important until World War I disrupted Italian citrus exports. In 1917, the American food chemist James Currie discovered certain strains of the mold Aspergillus niger could be efficient citric acid producers, and the pharmaceutical company Pfizer began industrial-level production using this technique two years later, followed by Citrique Belge in 1929. In this production technique, which is still the major industrial route to citric acid used today, cultures of A. niger are fed on a sucrose or glucose-containing medium to produce citric acid. The source of sugar is corn steep liquor, molasses, hydrolyzed corn starch or other inexpensive sugary solutions.After the mold is filtered out of the resulting solution, citric acid is isolated by precipitating it with lime (calcium hydroxide) to yield calcium citrate salt, from which citric acid is regenerated by treatment with sulfuric acid. One more ways to product citric acid is that Prior to the fermentative process, citric acid was isolated from citrus fruits. The juice was treated with lime (Ca(OH)2) to precipitate calcium citrate, which was isolated and converted back to the acid. More than 50% of this volume was produced in China. More than 50% was used as acidulent in beverages, some 20% in other food applications, 20% for detergent applications and 10% for related applications other than food, such as cosmetics, pharmaceutics and in the chemical industry. Store citric acid in an airtight container or plastic bag at room temperature. Stored properly, citric acid can be kept for years.
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