Crank it up and cream it off
If small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are something of an endangered species in UK dairy, as the sector consolidates in order to cut costs, at least part of the challenge they face is to do with innovation and how to support it with capital investment.
At the same time, advances in processing technology mean that there are perfectly sound reasons why businesses might want to upgrade or even rebuild their plant, whether for quality reasons, increased capacity or a wider product portfolio.
But, even when kept to a relatively modest scale, investment has to be finely-judged.
Producer of yogurts, including fat-free and Greek-style variants, Lancashire Farm Dairies has just installed a new line for its lassi processing and filling.
While pasteurisation and homogenisation capacity is shared with other product, fermentation and downstream processes are dedicated to the new line.
Md Azhar Zouq explains that the decision process simply in specifying pumps, including trialling them on-site, was a long and involved procedure, and of critical importance.
“Whichever kind of pump you install, you have to ensure that it doesn’t damage the product,” he says. “You want to get it through the filling nozzles without it being sheared off.”
Like other dairy businesses, the £25M-turnover company has to strike a balance between dedicated capacity and the kind of future-proofing that allows it to keep its options open.
In the case of its lassi line, Zouq says: “We think that, especially with the sugar tax coming in, drinking yogurts will be an expanding area for us.
“It’s a market that has picked up dramatically compared with five years ago. But you have skyr drinks, protein milk drinks and many others.
“Consumers will drop out from some of these products, if they don’t taste good. Lassi is different, because it’s about authenticity and flavour rather than some sort of health kick.”
Future proofing (back to top)
Lancashire Farm has also retained the option of increasing capacity in the event of further market growth.
“If we go up from 10t per hour to 15t, for example, we want to be in a position where we won’t need new pipework,” he says. “So we’ve oversized most of the pipework to four inch rather than two inch diameter.”
The alternative strategy of duplicating an entire installation to meet a hike in demand would seem, on the face of it, to be unnecessarily costly and to put any potential opportunity at risk with longer lead-times.
Perhaps it is inevitable that equipment suppliers should favour more rather than less capital expenditure, but Allan Bruun, dairy market unit manager at components supplier Alfa Laval, strikes a note of caution.
“If you are planning, for example, to double production over three or five years, the problem is that nothing really works when you run it at 50% capacity,” he claims.
“If you have half the flow through the heat exchanger, it will foul much faster, you might get burn-on and need to do clean-in-place [CIP] more often.
“But CIP itself would require much more cleaning liquid. If you followed that logic through an entire plant, it would probably mean that your product would end up being too expensive.”
On a more positive note, he points out that advances in CIP represent one major reason why companies regularly revisit and update their equipment.
According to Alfa Laval, the effectiveness of these systems, the speed of turnaround and the payback on investment have all improved dramatically over the past few years.
Elsewhere, flooring specialist Kemtile has installed a Kagetec ceramic floor tiling system at Somerset cheese producer AJ & RG Barber (see picture above) to meet a requirement for an hygienic floor for an extension to the company’s drying plant.
The work involved installing a new Wiedemann IKR heavy-duty stainless steel drainage channel – along with stainless steel kerbs to the perimeter of the area – which complemented the Kagetec GFK ceramic floor tiling system.
Kagetec GFK comprises an 18mm thick, fully vitrified porcelain ceramic hexagonal floor tile installed onto a cement based floor screed laid to ‘falls’. On top of which a special plastic mesh is placed and embedded into Kagetec epoxy adhesive.
Energy and water use (back to top)
At the same time, equipment is being designed to reduce energy and water consumption. Systems such as heat exchangers have become more efficient and precise in their temperature control.
This is especially important with liquid dairy products that may need to be heated up as high as 90°C and then cooled with consistent accuracy to around 20°C for filling.
Many smaller-scale or specialist dairy processors continue to source key elements in the formulation, such as whey protein or additional cream for yogurt, from external suppliers. Whether they are supplied in powder or liquid form, convenience is the main benefit for the processor.
That convenience is constantly being extended into new areas of functional and fortified dairy. “[Equipment] innovation has certainly made things easier for SMEs that want to add new ingredients to existing products,” says Bengt Eliasson, manager of the dairy aseptic centre of expertise at Tetra Pak.
Mixing, blending and standardisation equipment has become more efficient, says the company, and both powders and liquids can be more readily incorporated into product without entraining air.
As well as protein, this enrichment can take the form of calcium, omega-3, vitamins, fibre or even plant sterols, Eliasson says.
Increasingly, these opportunities arise from the overlap between dairy and other dynamic categories, especially in the ‘ready-to-drink’ segment.
Keith Goodby, Tetra Pak’s cluster category leader for dairy, explains: “Consumers are looking for value-added product, whether this is for building muscle, sports recovery, weight control or as a meal replacement.”
When it comes to investment, if a processor can afford to purchase equipment to create its own dairy streams and by-products, the capital cost may (depending on the process) be offset by ongoing ingredients savings.
But there are other reasons why smaller as well as larger businesses might be keen to move upstream processing of key ingredients in-house.
When powder formats, especially, are sourced externally, the producer may have little direct control over unwanted additives, or overall quality from one batch to the other.
At GEA, head of application development in liquid dairy Jörn Künsebeck points out that growing pressure to produce ‘clean-label’ ranges is having an ever-stronger influence on brand-owners.
“If you obtain your own raw materials through the process of improving and standardising milk, you’re not reliant on an external producer,” he says. “For a product such as yogurt, it means you no longer need to buy your ingredients on spot markets.”
With regard to yogurt, before Lancashire Farm Dairies made its lassi investment, it had already hitched a successful ride on another rising star in the dairy sector: Greek yogurt.
A separator installed several years ago allows the company to extract the cream from what later becomes its fat-free yogurt. The cream is then used to raise the fat content in the dairy’s Greek yogurt.
“Doing this in-house gives us perfect control over not only the amount of cream but also the quality and specification,” says Zouq.
In many cases, though, smaller businesses will not have the option of creating their own ingredients on-site. As GEA points out, the larger operators clearly enjoy economies of scale with a product stream such as whey.
“If there are products which result from fractionating milk, then you’re likely to be competing against producers who are handling, say, 5M litres a day,” says Künsebeck.
Künsebeck’s colleague Swami Sundaram, vice president for process engineering at GEA in the US, underlines the same point in relation to protein content.
“Protein-enriched milk can be produced via a process of microfiltration, but it’s not easy for a smaller operator to enter into that market,” he says.
Cold filtration (back to top)
Goodby at Tetra Pak gives one high-profile example: “[Coca-Cola-backed] Fairlife Foods in the US uses a one-of-a-kind cold filtration that concentrates the healthiest nutrients and filters away those that are not wanted.”
These types of filtration option, he explains, are generally more expensive than a “mixing solution”. “But they may allow producers to make an ‘added value’ claim for their products.”
More generally, smaller manufacturers will have to address the need to maximise value and minimise waste.
“There are always by-products, and a larger manufacturer is more likely to find a use for those products,” GEA’s Sundaram explains. “For a smaller operation, it’s going to be more challenging.”
There are other ways in which larger manufacturers can – literally sometimes – skim off healthier profits from the same volume of milk. “The protein levels in milk can vary from season to season,” Sundaram points out.
“Specifically for milk powder, there is an international standard for protein levels. So, rather than give away additional protein, an enterprising manufacturer can extract the excess for other uses.”
Finally, Tetra Pak extols the virtues of ultra-high temperature (UHT) processing for dairy SMEs, not with any quality objective in mind, but purely in terms of meeting production and logistics challenges.
“With a UHT product, you can produce a reasonable batch size with ambient distribution, which reduces cost,” Eliasson points out.
“This contrasts with the option of producing very small batch sizes of product with a limited shelf-life, and then relying on a supply chain that must be constantly chilled.”
