News Category: Opinion Piece

In today’s fast moving food and drink industry innovation is king. Everyone is looking for the next product to give their business the edge and food fashions and trends come and go with increasing speed. Food manufacturers often need to use seasonal ingredients, potentially offering limited edition flavors or varieties of key products: from herbal…

Cross contamination in the pharmaceutical industry is not just an issue for those working in it, but also for the wider public as a whole. Understandably, most of the attention on contamination in pharma manufacturing and processing is focused on either cross contamination between products or agents, or from the spread of agents, such as…

Pumps are an essential part of many food processing lines: not just for liquids, but also viscous materials such as spreads and dips, and materials containing solids such as fruit and vegetable mixes. Using the wrong pump can have expensive consequences in terms of both potential damage to products or equipment, or higher than expected…

The management and treatment of manures and slurries from livestock production is becoming an increasing issue around the world. The potential of manure to cause environmental harm and contribute to climate change when not correctly stored, handled or applied is significant. However, manures and slurries also represent a valuable resource and can return valuable crop…

Industry 4.0; fourth industrial revolution; internet of things – Three terms referring to the shift in industry towards autonomous production systems using machines which are controlled and monitored by computer-based algorithms. While there can be a lot of hype, there is no doubt that the general direction of travel in manufacturing is for the use…

Thanks to tighter environmental regulations and greater public awareness, companies are increasingly looking to reduce or eliminate the waste that they produce. In recent years, Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) has become an important waste reduction technique, but its potential in dealing with hazardous waste streams has not been fully appreciated until now. One of the…

Nut butter is one of the big food trends of the last two years. Once the only choice on the shelf would have been between smooth or crunchy peanut butter, but recently, as the health benefits of quality nut butter have been understood, the market has exploded to include peanut, almond, cashew, and even seed…

Different materials need different types of heat exchanger. For the simplest fluids such as water and milk, plate heat exchangers are often sufficient, but as products become more challenging (for example more viscous, or containing particles), then different types of tubular and scraped surface heat exchangers are required. For those products with extremely high fouling…

At UK AD & World Biogas Expo 2018 stand D603, HRS Heat Exchangers will showcase its novel Digestate Concentration System (DCS), which increases the dry solid content of digestate three-or four-fold, typically to between 10-20 per cent. By reducing the liquid fraction and therefore the overall volume of digestate produced, the DCS minimizes the economic…

HRS Heat Exchangers is shining a light on a forgotten area of food wastage at this year’s Propak Asia (stand BN42) – food lost during cleaning cycles and production changes. The HRS R Series of scraped surface heat exchangers removes food residues from inside the exchanger, meaning that food factories can now recover valuable product…