The clever way to stop milk losses in dairies

TAMPERE, Finland - Feb. 20, 2023 - PRLog -- Rising costs from inflation and increased focus on reducing carbon dioxide emissions make product loss management more important than ever in dairy plants. One major reason these losses occur is because process parameters are set incorrectly, causing a lot of dairy product to be unnecessarily washed out. Collo's unique liquid fingerprint technology addresses this problem by detecting any type of liquid in the pipes in real-time, offering an easy way to optimise production and cut product losses.

Millions of euros down the drain

For a typical dairy plant with an intake of around 250 million litres of milk per year, a loss of just 1% of the raw material corresponds to literally throwing about one million euros down the drain.

Mikko Tielinen points out that current solutions are insufficient for addressing the problem. Flow rate timing is inaccurate, and traditional sensors are unreliable and imprecise, with fouling and creep being major issues. As several types of traditional sensors are needed to detect different types of liquids, the optimisation systems become complicated and expensive to manage.

"Our solution, offers an easy and very accurate way to detect where exactly in the process the leakage is," Tielinen says. "It measures the exact real-time liquid fingerprint at any desired point in the process with a single EMF-sensor. Combined with machine learning, our solution ensures that the process stays optimised and easily monitored through our cloud solution."

Addresses problems at the source

Usually, product losses in the process are noticed when there is an excess of organic material in the effluent. This can also be a sign of problems in the production, however, measuring just the effluent does not tell why, and from where too much milk product is getting flushed out with the wastewater.

"As our technology can supervise all the draining points in real-time, it can keep track of the liquids in the pipes and show exactly where the leakage is," Mikko Tielinen says. "This makes it possible to address the problem at the point of origin, saving huge amounts of milk and money."

Reducing the milk waste improves profitability of a dairy plant, lowers the cost of wastewater treatment, and helps dairies to achieve their environmental goals.

"Most of the carbon dioxide generated in a dairy production originates from the stages before the milk even arrives at the dairy," Mikko Tielinen says. "That is why it is essential to not waste milk in the processing operations. If milk-based products are lost in a dairy, a replacement amount of milk will have to be produced and transported to the dairy, which will produce even more carbon dioxide emissions."

For more information contact:

Tuuli Potila
Phone: +358 10 200 1770
E-mail: tuuli.potila@collo.fi
www.collo.fi