GEA Hilge NOVALOBE in butter production line ensures safe processes and gentle product handling
The Customer: Vorarlberg Milch eGen, Austria
- The company philosophy: High quality “Ländle” milk and its derived products – fresh milk, cream, butter, yogurt, cottage cheese, fruit drinks and award-winning cheese specialties – paired with uncompromising hygiene standards and careful use of resources.
- Cooperative founded in 1940, today with 507 Vorarlberg farmers
- Headquarters in Feldkirch, Austria
- Each year, 121 employees process about 65 million kilograms of milk
The Requirements
René Längle, Production Manager for the “Weisse” & “Bunte” range, views their high degree of flexibility as the company's specialty: The dairy does not aim to be a high-volume production enterprise, it instead focuses on the quality of the individual products. In this way, it can quickly find organizational and technical solutions for special customer requests. The company is even capable of supplying small quantities on a day-to-day basis. Which is why the dairy is operating relatively many production lines.
Since the previous butter production plant required a lot of manual labor, the cooperative has decided to further improve the quality of “Ländle” butter by automating its butter production line.
Vorarlberg Milch focuses on quality and regionality. “Ultimately, it just has to taste great!” says Managing Director Raimund Wachter.
The Solution
Since 2017, Vorarlberg Milch implements the most modern state of development for its butter production: GEA’s fully automated BUE 1000 butter making machine. The manual labor is now done automatically according to prescribed recipes and is thus of a higher, and above all, a reproducible product quality.
GEA’s hygienic pumps help to repeatably achieve the quality goals in butter making: A GEA Hilge HYGIA pump pumps warm water into a heat exchanger to temper the cream. A GEA Hilge NOVALOBE transports the heated cream into a butter drum and then into a kneading unit. A second NOVALOBE is installed in the packaging line, which delivers butter from a butter silo for packaging.
Why were these pumps chosen? Basically, because GEA pumps operate smoothly, reports Christian Suppan. The maintenance technician does not know of a single case where a GEA pump unexpectedly failed and caused production to stop.
Dairies require special pumps that not only have the basic function of transporting a medium, another key requirement is hygiene. These pumps must not allow any contamination of the product. For this reason, they need to be absolutely hygienic in terms of dead spaces, gaps and surfaces.
GEA offers a hygienically safe and easy-to-handle solution with its Hilge NOVALOBE rotary lobe pump. The rotary lobe pumps comply with the relevant international guidelines such as GMP, FDA and QHD, they are EHEDG-certified and implement the general principles of hygienic design. The entire design is constructed without gaps and dead spaces, making it completely drainable and thus meeting the CIP cleaning and SIP sterilization requirements. Only FDA-approved materials are used, and the elastomers in contact with the media are subject to a defined compressive loading.
The GEA Hilge NOVALOBE rotary pump in the butter filling line.
Conclusion
The quality of the product as well as the technology makes all the difference. Vorarlberg Milk offers an even more spreadable butter in a reproducible composition, and GEA helps to achieve this with its complete butter making line, which includes a cream and butter pump.
René Längle and Christian Suppan are extremely satisfied with the consultation provided by GEA. After a year of operating experience, this also applies to the GEA Hilge NOVALOBE cream and butter pump.
Christian Suppan, Head of Maintenance at Vorarlberg Milk
A great supplier in terms of products, services and maintenance offers. GEAS's pumps are robust, reliable and low-maintenance!"(Christian Suppan, Head of Maintenance at Vorarlberg Milk)
(Christian Suppan, Head of Maintenance at Vorarlberg Milk)
GEA Hilge NOVALOBE
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