## 1 Introduction  
Apples have been widely recognized as a highly consumed fruit worldwide. Specifically, this fruit presented in 2019/2020 a world production of approximately 76 million tons [1]. Thus, the food industry has applied traditional technologies to keep this fruit available throughout the year through the development of numerous products from fresh apples, such as juice, jellies, jams, purees, wines, and sauces, among others [2]. However, concentration by evaporation, the most used technology in the food industry, exhibited disadvantages due to the high temperatures used, which accelerate the degradation of physicochemical properties and bioactive compounds, and affect the health benefits associated to fruit consumption [3]. Therefore, in the last decade, potential and alternative non-thermal technologies, such as pulsed UV-light (PL), ultrasound (US), irradiation (IR), pulsed electric field (PEF),high-pressure processing (HPPP), cold plasma (CP), and cryoconcentration (CC) have been studied in order to protect and preserve various heat-labile components, and so, retain important nutritional and sensory characteristics in the final product [4].  
CC has been known as a novel, non-thermal and emerging technology, in which the temperature of an aqueous solution or dispersion is cooled below its freezing point until the complete solidification of the liquid sample, then the unfrozen liquid fraction (cryoconcentrate) is separated from the ice phase by natural thawing or by addiction of an external force (also called assisted technique) to the CC process [5]. Hence, CC can be used as a concentration technology to preserve heat-labile components, with a minimal loss of important components [6].  
Actually, three CC procedures are available at industrial, semi-industrial and laboratory level: (i) suspension (SCC) [7], (ii) progressive (PCC) [8; 9], and (iii) block cryoconcentration (BCC) [10]. In BCC, a liquid solution is completely freezing; then the block is thawed and, finally, the cryoconcentrate is separated from the ice fraction. Therefore, BCC utilizes three steps: complete freezing, thawing, and separating [11]. Precisely, the final stage in BCC has been carried out by passive thawing [12] or with the help of assisted techniques coupled to the BCC system to improve some process parameters such as efficiency, solute yield and/or percentage of concentrate [5].  
Specifically, centrifugation has been applied as an assisted technique to BCC, with remarkable results, since it enhanced the solute extraction from the veins formed in the ice fraction and, thus, it increased the process parameters and final amount of cryoconcentrate solute after the separation step. Studies have reported that the efficiency process was improved with values between 60% and 75% at three centrifugal cycles [13]. Hence, centrifugal block cryoconcentration (CBCC) has been applied in different frozen liquid samples [14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19; 20]. Although CBCC has been applied in fruit juices, there is very little scientific data reported in the literature on the retention of heat-labile components in various juices, e.g., fresh apple juice.  
Therefore, the overall objective of the present study is to evaluate the effect of CBCC to protect valuable quality attributes, such as physicochemical parameters, bioactive compounds, antioxidant activity, volatile profile and sensory properties of apple juice (_Malus domestica_ cv. _Red Fuji_).