Modernising a dairy plant

The German dairy plant Milchwerk Crailsheim-Dinkelsbühl eG processes around 150,000 tons of raw milk from cooperative suppliers every year, and prepares it to produce Balkan cheese, pasta filata cheese Kashkaval and grill cheese.

In June 2022, GEA commenced modernisation of the dairy’s milk treatment area. Its associated cheese dairies are then supplied with pretreated — purified, heated and mixed — milk. GEA will also further advance the digitalisation of the dairy, with completion planned for early 2023.

The heat treatment of raw milk is immensely important for hygienic cheese production, but at the same time it requires a lot of energy if the technology and process integration are not perfectly designed.

“Energy efficiency is our top priority when we think about the future of our dairy,” said Josef Vögele, Managing Director of Milchwerk Crailsheim.

Key technology and components at the dairy, such as skimmers, valves and plate heat exchangers, are all supplied by GEA. The next step will see GEA work with the dairy to develop a comprehensive energy and heat quantity concept for the entire plant, thereby unlocking CO₂ savings potential.

“In Crailsheim they face similar challenges to many other small and medium-sized dairies: sustainability and digitalisation are taking hold — and they can only be implemented by using efficient high-performance technologies and consistent process planning,” said Steffen Rathmann, Managing Director of GEA TDS. “To tackle these issues, which are so omnipresent in the industry, we develop the process and technology design based on the specific conditions onsite. It makes us proud to have the opportunity to set up the technical backbone for the future success of our customers like Milchwerk Crailsheim.”

In addition to the above technology, the dairy opted to record the plant history via GEA Codex Plant Playback. This automation solution analyses industrial processes batch by batch as a software-based video recorder. It can reveal dependencies, errors and their causes, which can be easily fixed. The software animates SCADA Historian data in real time or time lapse. This is designed to improve both production as well as product and process safety.

In order to connect the cheese dairy to the machine room in Crailsheim, GEA will also technologically modify various tank farms, fundamentally rebuilding all valve blocks and the cheese milk tank farm. To ensure high microbiological quality, the dairy will install a new pasteuriser with surplus cream cooling and two new thermisers. During the project, the existing CIP station will be upgraded. An additional skimming separator is equipped with GEA proplus technology, which is designed to increase protein yield and reduce freshwater consumption through longer emptying intervals for the milk separator. The cheese production technology is complemented by two new calcium chloride stations which increase yield and improve product quality through stabilised rennet gel.

The modernisation of the dairy will take place without stopping production.