FDBusiness.com

Earlier this year, Gemak was awarded a contract to manufacture and commission a state-of-the-art continuous yogurt processing plant at Llaeth y Llan, Village Dairy where Gareth Roberts and his family have been producing superb, award winning yogurts since the ‘80s. Plenty of hard work and perseverance has helped create a beautiful Welsh yogurt that people throughout Great Britain love eating!

The new plant is in operation, capable of a fully automated continuous blending and processing of 3000 l/h yogurt. The plans for the new plant come on the back of a successful growth in Village dairies fruit yogurt market.

Village Dairy General Manager, Owain Roberts says: “We are very excited about our new plant and opportunities it brings to our business. With the new plant we have been able to achieve consistent and repeatable quality, exacting recipes, better controls and advanced data accumulation, improved efficiency and better yields with a much faster output rate. Gemak has delivered on every promise. We have visited Gemak at their new production plant and were very impressed with their quality, manufacturing, level of engineering and their experience in dairy processing. They also offered the quickest lead time and most competitive prices in the market.”

General view of mixing and pasteurisation.

Fully Automated

The fully automated processing plant incorporates a continuous inline yogurt mix preparation and pasteurisation system for different recipes. A number of recipes can be entered consecutively at the start of the shift into the Scada system with the desired quantity and destination vessels for a non-stop processing shift with continuous recipe change-overs. With the touch of a button the system weighs and accurately feeds the necessary ingredients into a mix vessel, blends, dehydrates, homogenises, pasteurises, holds and cools before sending the recipes with desired quantities into pre-selected vessels for fermentation.

The yogurt is than cooled to the desired temperature and fed to bespoke design ribbon blenders for fruit addition followed by very gentle, accurate and effective blending without impacting on the viscosity of yogurt. From here the yogurt is packed into tubs. Gemak also supplied 2 CIP units for raw and finished, raw milk reception unit and water chiller.

Benefits

Fermentation room.

The new application removes a timely process of pre-mixing and preparing of the blends for the base prior to pasteurisation with a new in-line automated liquid and powder recipe blend process in-line with the continuous pasteurisation. The benefits of the new system to Village Dairy are reduced labour with 60% reduction in energy use, 70% increase in processing speed, 60% improvement in process controls, monitoring and recording.

Kursat Uysal from Gemak UK says: “Village dairy is very well known and admired for their superb yogurt quality that they developed and perfected over the last 30 years with a loyal customer base. I am also one of those customers – so you can imagine the pressure.

“We were given the task not only to design and commission a fully automated turnkey yogurt processing plant with improvements in all areas which we have a lot of experience and know how in but also to match/improve on the current product quality, taste and viscosity. We are very pleased to have lived up to our customer’s expectation and delivering on our promise. Gemak specialise in process solutions for the dairy industry and has manufactured and installed over 300 turnkey dairy plants around the world since 1986.”