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