02 JUL 2007
The new DOC Kaas cooperative cheese factory at Hoogeven in the eastern Netherlands was a major challenge for all those involved in the 100 million Euro project.
The company’s underlying goal was to lay the foundation stone for future expansion, to focus all production here on a single site at a later date, and to reduce operating costs by introducing the very latest production technology. The three-year project has now resulted in what is almost certainly Europe’s largest cheese factory, with an output capacity of more than 70,000 tons a year.
The factory is big enough to accommodate further expansion. However, the Hoogeven factory is not just impressive by virtue of its size, rather it is the technical innovation which extends right down to the detailed design of the individual items of plant and equipment. The outcome is a production set-up which achieves new standards for the production of cheese on an industrial scale. Tuchenhagen Dairy Systems was responsible for the liquid processing systems including
automation, overall engineering for production management and the operational data logging system.
Joachim Löw, project manager for Tuchenhagen Dairy Systems, told EDM that DOC Kaas set an
extremely challenging set of requirements for contractors and suppliers. The main driver behind the new factory was not the question of the overall investment level; rather how investment would reduce longterm operating and production costs. Said Löw: “We don’t see this level of customer
professionalism every day. But of course, low production costs can only be achieved using an exceptionally high level of automation.” The new factory is on-stream 22 hours a day, with a total of approximately 80 workers. Each day they convert about 2 million litres of milk to Dutch-type mihard
cheeses, though at present in the first phase of production only cheese blocks. For the moment cheese is stored elsewhere prior to sale, though construction of an onsite ripening store is disaged at a later date.
See complete article issued in EDM 2004