PETpla.net Insider 01+02 / 2017

BOTTLING / FILLING PET planet Insider Vol. 18 No. 01+02/17 www.petpla.net 16 Handling high-acid products Fruitful alliance Based on an article by Roland Scheuing, Krones AG Ten years ago, the Gropper dairy company started a production opera- tion for fruit smoothies as dealer’s brands, and has for seven years now also been making NFC juices. Cur- rently, juices and smoothies account for over a quarter of total sales. Buoy- ant growth over recent years was the reason that Gropper had come up against the limits of its capacities at its headquarters in Bissingen, Germany. The obvious option was to erect a new filling plant next to the Dreher facility in Stockach, with Innocent as a long-term partner for contract-bottling, and with Dreher as the NFC-juice sup- plier next door, so to speak. The production operation in Stockach is focussed on coopera- tion with Innocent, a British producer of juices and smoothies. The plan is that in future Gropper will here be filling the vast majority of refrigerated NFC juices of the Innocent brand for continental Europe, but no smoothies. In Stockach, Gropper fills NFC juices for which cooling is mandatory not only in this strategic alliance but also for customers from the retailing trade. The fresh juices from Innocent, first and foremost NFC apple juices, but also various blends like apple-mango, apple-berry or apple-peach-pear juices, are delivered by the neighbour Dreher – through a pipeline. Thanks to the short distance involved, heating up the juices a second time can now be eliminated. This sort of flash pasteurisation had hitherto been necessary following tanker-truck transit. Now, the interface is located directly in the filling line. This is also the reason that Gropper does not need its own process tech- nology for juices in Stockach. Two filling lines featuring the UltraClean process The result was that Gropper had to build a bottling hall “merely” 2,500m 2 in size, plus an adjacent warehouse for coolants, raw, processing and operating materials. For this purpose, the newly founded company Grop- per Fruchtsaft GmbH has invested around 30 million euros, 20 million euros of this in new machinery alone. The cold-storage warehouse, cooled down to 3-6°C and equipped with automated narrow-aisle forklift trucks, serves as a buffer store. The finished products are kept here for one to two days. This fast turnover rate, however, also increases the pressure on the filling operation to provide a sufficient number of packaged products at any given time. For its filling operation, Gropper opted for two lines installed in paral- lel, each rated at 25,000 1l containers an hour, which are largely identical in their layouts. The divergences are due ASEPTIC HOT FILL SPECIAL In Stockach on the shores of Lake Constance, the German Gropper dairy had in mid-2015 opened its second facil- ity, which fills NFC juices (not-from-concentrate juices) in PET containers. Two can-do alliances were instrumental in achieving this: one of them is a cooperative arrangement with the English vendor of smoothies and NFC juices, Inno- cent, and the second is with Dreher Spirit of Fruits, a com- pany producing NFC juices, purees and concentrates. Two Krones filling lines featuring the UltraClean process are bottling the juices under safe microbiological conditions. The high H 2 O 2 concentration, in conjunc- tion with the hot preforms, provides pre- form decontamination inside and out. Berthold Burgmeier (right), Technical Manager at Gropper, with Gerd Schanzenbach, Gropper Plant Manager at Stockach