Earlier, the Indian dairy industry was limited to producing traditional products viz. liquid milk, butter, ghee and powders. While now, it is providing sophisticated and ever-changing range of products like cheese, UHT milk and ice cream, this is putting a huge pressure on productivity excellence. Dairies are now struggling to improve on both productivity and quality. They are trying various things like utility economies, new equipments, and increasing capacities.
In earlier times, Indian dairies never used to focus on downtimes, total yields, per person productivity etc. but now this focus is building up. Use of proper cleaning and sanitation solutions help the dairy industry to achieve these objectives and the industry is now looking forward to these solutions for continuous improvements. Having a solution, which can deliver cleaning in the shortest possible time and maintaining the highest levels of hygiene with meeting environmental norms, is the requirement of modern Indian dairy industries.
Proper cleaning and sanitation have remained a challenge because of complex nature of milk and complex processing parameters. This becomes more complex because of varying equipment surfaces, temperature availabilities, surface properties and so on among plants, collection centres and chilling centres. Chilling centres do not have high capacity boilers, while at collection centres, farmers use solar heaters or very small boilers for achieving temperature for cleaning. These temperatures are generally not adequate enough to have proper cleaning. Understanding these parameters along with limitation of equipment can help us achieving our objectives. Poor cleaning leads to poor quality product, more wastages, high downtime, high energy and water consumption, faster equipment deterioration and poor safety levels.
Some of our key concerns related to cleaning can be related to temperature, water availability, water hardness, energies, quality, user convenience and downtime. Let’s try solving these concerns for dairy industries:
1. Temperature: This is mainly a concern at collection centers and chilling centers. As these centers mainly require refrigeration facilities, thus true attention is not paid on building temperature availability requirements for cleaning purposes. Controls are also difficult at these locations, as these are away from our plants and especially collection centres are very high in numbers to exercise proper control. These are also backbone of final product quality. Poor quality milk always leads to poor quality product. These centres may act as a potent source of microbial contamination in milk, leading to poor quality. Maintaining quality at these points is certainly going to provide huge benefits to the plant. Having a solution, which can provide cleaning and sanitation together at lower temperature with user convenience may be useful at these locations. Recent award-winning technologies like Advantis LT, which is hydrogen peroxide-based cleaning-cum-sanitation technology, is a perfect fit as solution for collection centres and chilling centres. These new technologies can work at 43-50 deg.C with reduced water requirements and importantly provide cleaning and sanitation together, improving overall milk quality.
2. Water Availability: Water ratio generally remains in the range of 1.5-3 litres of water per litre of milk processed. Focus on water with relatively recent innovations like recycling, burst rinsing, use of condensate etc. has given its results. However depleting water tables are giving concerns to plants in water scarcity areas to the extent of losing their sustainability. According to an estimate, about 61% water is consumed for cleaning operations and only 39% is used for actual product usage in a multiple dairy plant. Innovations have been mainly around water savings around product usages, which is relatively a small contributor in total water consumption. Solutions, which are easily rinse-able or can, eliminate few of CIP cycles can help in this regard. New technologies, which can eliminate or minimise acid cycle can help in substantial savings of time and water. Conversion of 5-step CIP in to 3-step CIP would reduce water equivalent to one detergent cycle and one rinse cycle. Similarly, easy rinsing solutions, better interface controls and terminal disinfectant would require less water for rinsing. Replacing alkaline cleanings with acid cleanings, wherever possible like in cold surface cleaning would further enhance water savings.
3. Water Hardness: This is one of the major issues in parts of India. It ranges between 50 ppm and 2,200 ppm in various parts of our country. High hardness necessitates use of higher dosage of detergents for cleaning, which in turn would need high amount of rinsing water. Water hardness is generally taken care of by using softeners. However, again there is a limitation in case of chilling centres and collection centres, where softening facilities are generally not available. Using hard water for cleaning leaves mineral soil on equipments, making cleaning operation difficult. Also, mineral soils decreases surface heat transfer properties and thus increases steam and refrigeration costs. Advance solutions, which are customised to be used with hard water or solutions, which take care of hardness of water would solve these issues and result in to improved energy costs, water savings, and quality and user convenience.
4. Energy Consumption: Dairy factories use significant amounts of energy, depending on the type of products, being manufactured. Cleaning is major consumer of energy. About 73% of steam is used by cleaning operation and remaining 27% is used for processing operations in a multi-dairy plant according to an analysis. Currently, we, in our country, are using heat energy recovery and alternate sources (such as solar heater at collection centres) as major tool for energy savings. While, another important aspect is relatively not looked upon. Shorter cleaning cycles, cleaning at lower temperatures and ambient temperature disinfection may contribute significantly in energy savings. Cleaning programmes reducing temperatures from 85 deg C to 65 deg C may contribute about 20% to energy savings. These technologies are now available in India too and are being used. Peroxyacetic Acid based disinfection technology is one such technology. This does not require any rinsing and works at ambient temperature, thus saving energy, time and water for us. Hydrogen Peroxide-based detergents may reduce cleaning temperature and time with improved cleaning efficacies. Energy is the biggest contributor in terms of cost of cleaning. Saving this result in significant savings of money.
5. Downtime: We, at a dairy plant, work for production, but spend significant time in cleaning the plant. We consider 4 hours in a day for cleaning. Reducing this downtime by even one hour, would give us 5% additional production, time of unplanned downtime activities, repairs etc. Over this, exposing our equipments to detergent for lesser time would increase their shelf life. We can reduce cleaning time by using advance formulated detergents, which are designed specific to their use. Elimination or minimisation of acid cycles on hot surfaces, better rinsing solutions, faster cleaning solutions and single-step cleaning techniques can contribute significantly to time savings. This in addition to time saving would result in equivalent savings of steam, power and water. Load over ETP would also be reduced.
6. User Convenience: This is generally not a problem inside the plant, as we operate using standard operating programmes and plants are run by professionals. However, number of chilling and collection centres does not allow a good control on cleaning efficiency at these locations. Providing convenience at these locations would improve cleaning practices. Solutions, which can work at lower concentrations or lower temperatures, easy to handle and providing consistent cleaning need to be used at these locations. These solutions would need lesser control to have consistent level of cleaning every day.
Our traditional cleaning protocols are not designed keeping upcoming challenges. Industry needs to keep this updating with new solutions to keep a pace with growing consumer demands and industry demands. Better hygiene technologies will equip the Indian dairy industry with the means of counter pressures of shrinking capacities, rising energy and water costs, rising consumer expectations, meeting environmental challenges, upgrading quality standards and meeting food safety regulations.
