Food & Beverage Industry News - August 2019

AUGUST 2019

XPlanar: Floating Movers with six degrees of freedom

AUGUST 2019

Branding and cold supply chain: Getting them right

PLUS: Food & Beverage Industry Awards' Winners | Fish Farming | Coles' New Leaf

WELCOME

Managing Director: John Murphy Publisher: Christine Clancy Managing Editor: Syed Shah Editor: Mike Wheeler

Closing the gaps in branding and supply chain

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Editor: Mike Wheeler

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Copyright Food & Beverage Industry News is owned by Prime Creative Media and published by John Murphy. All material in Food & Beverage Industry News is copyright and no part may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means (graphic, electronic or mechanical including information and retrieval systems) without written permission of the publisher. The Editor welcomes contributions but reserves the right to accept or reject any material. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of information, Prime Creative Media will not accept responsibility for errors or omissions or for any consequences arising from reliance on information published.

The opinions expressed in Food & Beverage Industry News are not necessarily the opinions of, or endorsed by the publisher unless otherwise stated. © Copyright Prime Creative Media, 2019 Articles All articles submitted for publication become the property of the publisher. The Editor reserves the right to adjust any article to conform with the magazine format.

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hat is branding and where does it fit in your business? What about supply chain? They seem simple things to get to grips with when looking at setting up a food and beverage enterprise.

However, it is not as simple as it seems. In our Thought Leadership section, we find out from PepsiCo’s Australasian CEO, Danny Celoni, and brewery giant non-executive chairman, Sir Rod Eddington, their thoughts of where the country stands with these two aspects of the food and beverage industry. It looks like we need to do better on both fronts. But as well as offering critiques, both men also come up with remedies that can help Australia move forward when it comes to making sure we have adequate supply chains in place, as well as making sure the food and beverage industry

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6 NEWS

36 INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

59 WASTEWATER

16 THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

38 MARKET RESEARCH

60 WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

19 NEW TECHNOLOGIES

40 AIP

62 AFGC

23 AQUACULTURE

46 FOOD AND BEVERAGE 63 DAIRY REPORT INDUSTRY AWARDS 64 MARKETWATCH 55 ENERGY SUPPLY 65 NEW PRODUCTS 56 CONSUMER

28 INSTRUMENTATION 28 Dingley Ave Dandenong VIC 3175

Mike Wheeler

INSIDE

26 BELTS Printed by: Manark Printing

has strong branding guidelines.

On July 18, we celebrated the 16th annual Food and Beverage Industry Awards. The two key words mentioned by most speakers and the judges, too, were sustainability and innovation. The former relates to packaging – this edition of Food & Beverage Industry News has several stories on the subject – while the latter refers to how much thinking outside the box food and beverage developers do in order to solve issues when bringing new products and machinery to market. Read about the winners and their successful products in this issue starting on page 43. Congratulations to all the winners on the night from all of us here at Food & Beverage Industry News.

30 FOOD SAFETY 34 SUSTAINABILITY

4 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

58 SKILLS AND OPPORTUNITIES

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NEWS

Positive prospects of flavoured drinks sector through 2028

In the alcoholic beverage sector, flavour carriers are seeing a growth in their market.

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report titled Flavour Carriers Market: Global Industry Analysis 2013–2017 and Forecast 2018–2028, showed that the flavour carriers market reached nearly $1.97 billion in 2018 in terms of value, and is forecasted to reach $2.63 billion by the end of 2028. The global flavour carriers market is expected to grow at the CAGR of three per cent in terms of value from the estimated year (2018) to the forecast year (2028). Convenience food products are the prominent consumed foodstuffs in the food industry. These include cheese, butter, snack products, packaged food and others. These are the daily need products that are available as ready-to-eat products without further preparation, which contain flavour carriers as ingredients to enhance the taste, texture, colour and durability of products.

Changing food habits and busy lifestyle are the reasons that are driving the market of convenience food products. These products have increasing demand on every day basis. It is forecasted that the convenience food market has high growth in upcoming

years, which is surging in the market of flavour carriers.

Health conscious consumers demand healthy and natural products, which are generally recognised as safe by food regulatory authorities. To enhance the taste and durability of healthy and natural food products, manufacturers are using flavour emulsion in these products, which is creating huge market opportunities for the flavour carriers market.

Numerous flavour emulsions are available in the flavour carrier’s market and serve industries such as bakery, fruit, and alcoholic as well as non-alcoholic beverages industry.

The demand for alcoholic beverages is rising, which means that flavour carriers are at an initial phase of market growth.

Companies are focussing on future technological advancement and innovations to use flavours in different products.

Non-alcoholic fruit and flavoured beverages, including carbonated products, soft drinks, energy drinks, and fruit juices, demand the highest number of flavours, fruit flavours, and flavour emulsions. This leads to an increase in demand

6 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

for flavour carriers.

The flavour emulsion segment is estimated to hold a 74.6 per cent market share by value in the flavour carriers market by the end of 2018, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 2.7 per cent in terms of value from the estimated year (2018) to the forecast year (2028).

The European and Asia Pacific regions are expected to hold promising opportunities in terms of value increase and reach $157 million and $326 million with CAGR of 2.2 per cent and 4.2 per

The global flavour carriers market is expected to grow by three per cent to 2028.

cent respectively by the year 2028.

European countries always set new trends in the food and beverages market. Hence, the region is expected to have high demand for flavour carriers.

India and China are highly populated countries. The increasing per capita income and spending power of consumers is driving the market for convenience and packaged food and ready-to-drink beverages in this region, which is further fuelling the flavour carriers market.

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NEWS

Australian energy drink, Kanguru, expands into Korea A

ustralian-owned energy drink Kanguru has announced it will launch into South Korea later this year alongside the appointment of David Westall to the key position of president for the Asia Pacific region.

Kanguru is an energy plus vitality drink created by Australian medical specialist Dr David Kitchen.

Kitchen, chairman and CEO of Red Kangaroo Beverages Australia, which produces Kanguru, said he was delighted to officially welcome Westall to the team.

“We started exploring overseas opportunities and chose South Korea as our first country to launch into,” he said. “Since December 2018, we’ve had the privilege of working with David as an advisor and board member. His breadth of knowledge and experience within the category, and across both the Australian and

Asian marketplace, is unsurpassed.”

Westall has had more than 20 years’ experience working with world-leading brands such as CocaCola, Minute Maid, Pepsi Cola, Hershey, Evian, Schweppes, and many other household beverage and food brands.

“His experience includes the development and introduction of numerous innovative new brands, across many regions in multiple beverage and food categories including energy drinks, soft drinks, water, fruit juice, sports drinks, confectionery, dairy products, snacks and tea. I’m excited by how his experience will help facilitate the continued growth and development for Kanguru,” Kitchen said.

Westall said he was excited to join the team and that he believed this product was unique, delivered on its promise, and would redefine the category.

“I’m confident Kanguru will rewrite what is ‘acceptable’ for people to consume as a real energy drink,” he said. “I’ve studied and tested the science that has gone into the creation of Kanguru and quite simply it does what it says – it doesn’t cause harm, but enhances your mind and body, enabling you to get more out of life. It has a substantial amount of evidencebased ingredients and it has a wonderful citrus taste. This product will redefine energy drinks and functional beverages.”

Westall said that Kanguru’s Korean launch date was marked for early September. “There are more than 10,000 convenience stores ready to take their first shelf stock of Kanguru,” he said. “The Korean team are busy signing listings with many other retail sales channels including supermarkets, cafes, gyms, universities, highway petrol

Kanguru president for the Asia Pacific Region, David Westall. stations and online markets.”

Westall said his first priority would be growing distribution and consumer marketing regards to the unique and high-quality innovative formula of Kanguru.

Sanitation and fungicide-resistance testing service available A new sanitation and fungicide-resistance testing service is being provided

by NSW Department of Primary Industries and Citrus Australia.

The service provides information to packers on the levels of sanitation and technical resistance to postharvest fungicides in their packing houses.

A fungicide-resistance testing service gives information on levels of sanitation in packing houses.

10 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

John Golding, research horticulturalist with NSW DPI and leader of the Hort Innovationfunded, post-harvest science program, said the results of

fungicide-resistance surveys showed there are variable levels of sanitation and technical fungicide resistance within the different packing houses around Australia.

“It is critical to measure and monitor both packing house sanitation and hygiene, and the levels of technical resistance to postharvest fungicides,” Golding said.

“If unchecked, poor sanitation and resistance to post-harvest fungicides will reduce the efficacy of fungicides leading to decay.”

The service is run through the Citrus Australia website with technical support and reports by NSW Department of Primary Industries. *This service is not supported or related to Hort Innovation.

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NEWS

East 9th Brewing acquires Sample Brew

L-R: East 9th Brewing’s Benjamin Cairns, Stephen Wools, and Josh Lefers, with new team member, Matt Rees.

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ast 9th Brewing has acquired fellow independent brewing company Sample Brew for an undisclosed figure after Sample Brew was handed over to administrators in mid-May. Sample Brew was founded in 2014 and is known for its core range of premium brews including Sample Pale Ale, Sample Gold Ale, Sample Lager, and the acclaimed Sample ¾ IPA. The brand is prolifically stocked across Australia in bottle, can and keg. East 9th Brewing was founded in 2010 and is home to one of Australia’s biggest selling

alcoholic ginger beers, Lick Pier, and the iconic Doss Blockos Pale Lager.

In 2017, Sample Brew announced plans to become Australia’s first beer company to raise funds with “crowd equity”. These plans were pulled due to reported outside investor interest, which ultimately fell through and led to the eventual voluntary administration of the company.

“It’s not an easy thing to create a sustainable beer business in Australia. Just because the category is experiencing great growth, doesn’t mean it directly correlates to an easy ride and great profitability for

the companies that operate within that space,” said Josh Lefers of East 9th Brewing. East 9th Brewing will be taking over Sample Brew’s portfolio immediately, along with re-employing a number of the Sample sales team.

“The Sample brand was always one that we admired from afar…the previous team has done an amazing job building the brand over the past five years and we plan to continue to build on that,” said East 9th Brewing’s senior sales and marketing manager, Benjamin Cairns.

The acquisition by East 9th

Brewing is the first of many planned moves the company will undertake in the near future. “East 9th Brewing has plans for a collection of hero partner venues to call home, as well as an appetite for further acquisitions.

In line with our vision to have Australia’s largest independent cross-category portfolio, we have an exciting new product development pipeline that extends on our current range of beer and near-beer products and will include some new huge growth areas such as craft wine,” said company owner Stephen Wools of East 9th Brewing.

www.foodmag.com.au | August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 13

NEWS

Snack food manufacturing develops a taste for the future A recent report by IBISWorld has forecast a sweet future for the snack food manufacturing industry in Australia.

The report anticipates that industry revenue will rise by 1.2 per cent each year in the five years until 2023-24, reaching a total of $1.8 billion.

The report puts down this increase to rising household disposable incomes and the greater popularity of healthy snack foods. While the consumption in health-conscious snacking habits by consumers has increased, particularly in urban areas, the high-sodium and high-fat snack offerings have receded in popularity.

However, with food manufacturers developing new healthy snack products, consumers are starting to come back to snacks.

The report notes that the higher sales of muesli bars, grain or wheat snacks and nuts has driving this new popularity for healthy snacks,

Revenue in the snack-food industry will rise to $1.8 billion by 2023-24.

and those manufacturers who have included whole grain and premium chips in their range or low-fat and low-carbohydrate versions as seeing increased sales and growth.

Another impact on the value and popularity of snacks has been the increase in the domestic price of vegetables, which the report predicts

will continue to rise, however not as quickly as in the past five years.

As eating patterns continue to shift, snack manufacturers could adapt to the increase in the appetite of consumers for out-of-home eating.

The portability of snacks in smaller package sizes and their distributed purchase points make them attractive

to consumers who are seeking a food purchase on the move.

In contrast to the past five years, where industry revenue dropped as private labels encroached on the market share of established players and input prices became increasingly volatile, IBISWorld sees a positive future for the industry.

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THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

Branding and supply chain: why they matter Getting your branding and supply chain right are critical in the food and beverage industry, especially if companies are looking to export to lucrative overseas markets. Food & Beverage Industry News finds out from PepsiCo the role of these two important aspects of doing business overseas.

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anny Celoni is the Australasian CEO of one of the most recognisable names on the planet – PepsiCo. Having more than 22 years’ experience in sales, strategising and marketing throughout the Pacific and Asian regions, he is in a good place to see where Australian brands fit. Not only in terms of names themselves, but perceptions, too. “[I think] Brand Australia has a lot of equity with a lot of our brands,” he said at the recent Global Food Forum held in Sydney.

“PepsiCo has a huge snack portfolio including the likes of Red Rock Deli chips and Twisties and we are seeing Brand Australia becoming more prominent. We are well placed from

a value-add perspective. It’s all about quality, food security, consistency – they’re core elements that make Brand Australia prevalent.”

Appearing on stage with Celoni was Sir Rod Eddington, who, among other things, is the non-executive chairman of brewery giant Lion.

A Rhodes Scholar who attended Oxford, Eddington is a strong believer in having big ties to Asia.

His Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun awarded to him by the Japanese government in 2015 for his contribution to strengthening economic relations between Australia and Japan is proof of that.

And although he is a champion of local produce, he is slightly less optimistic about Australia’s brand

Having decent cold storage facilities at international airports like Sydney, are critical for food supply chains.

16 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

presence. He believes Australian food producers have a way to go in the branding stakes. He cites Australia’s neighbours across the Tasman, and a home-grown example, as a prime illustrations of how Australia should be positioning itself.

“We have a long way to go on Brand Australia to be frank,” he said.

“The Kiwis have done a brilliant job.

The 100 per cent Pure New Zealand brand is a very good one.

“The part of Australia that is probably closest to being in the right space is Tasmania. Tasmania has built a reputation for itself, over a long period of time, not only as a producer of world-class wool, but of world-class seafood and vegetables.

I think there is some real examples

to be taken from Tasmania. As good as Australian food is, it still doesn’t have an overarching brand with the quality that the Kiwis have delivered.”

Eddington also made it very clear that the supply chain has to be up to scratch. If it’s not, then it doesn’t matter how high-quality your food or beverage is, you will make no inroads into some of the more fickle, but lucrative, markets.

“If you are exporting fresh and chilled products including cold foods, then supply chain is critical,” said Eddington. “An hour on the tarmac in the sun can destroy the product. As a company, we are really focussed on what supply chains are best and there are plenty of places

in Asia where they are good. Japan is good. Hong Kong is very good as is Singapore. There are parts of China – especially where you have to trans-ship goods – where you may have a problem.

“There are other places in Southeast Asia where there are opportunities, but, as yet, their supply chains are not strong enough.

And if their supply chains are not strong enough, you can’t risk your product because it will affect your brand. We are very much focussed on working with shippers and transport companies that can deliver certainty around cold store supply chain. It’s not only just for us. If you are selling sea food, fruit, vegetables, chilled meat into Asia – and that is where there is a substantial opportunity – then you need to have the certainty of supply chain.”

One up and coming country is Vietnam. While not at the standard it needs to be for Australian exporters, the country is making an effort to get the infrastructure in place so that it soon will be a gateway for Australian cold store exporters to land their goods.

“The Vietnamese are in the process of upgrading their supply chain,” said Eddington. “It is not as reliable [compared to some other Asian destinations], but it is a real opportunity for our businesses.”

He was also quick to point out that it wasn’t that long ago that all the bigger airports in Australia had the problem of not very good cold store supply chain facilities. He is confident that many countries around the world, including those in Asia, will see the benefits of a reliable cold store chain supply.

What about regional Australia, though? The majority of the country’s food is grown in regions, so why not set up cold store facilities at the local airports and export directly to overseas markets? Fair point, said Eddington. While there are some places that are starting to do that, there are roadblocks that need to be overcome.

“The thing about cold store supply chains is that they cost a lot of money,” he said. “You need the throughput and volume to make them work.

“There was a time when our major airports didn’t necessarily have high-quality cold supply chains and they do now. For instance,

Red Rock Deli potato chips are now available in the US after receiving positive retailer feedback.

Cathay Pacific offers a freight service once a week, hoping to go twice week, to Toowoomba.

“There is an opportunity to exports vegetables and fruit out of that area to North Asia. There are opportunities in the regions, but you do need to pick your mark carefully.

“If you want to deliver highquality goods to North Asia – freshness and reliability is key. That really means the big airports have to have the facilities.

“The other thing big airports need to have – and is a big advantage of Melbourne’s over Sydney – is no curfew.”

It not only Asia that is opening up to Australian produce. One United States success story of a value added product doing well overseas is the Australian developed – and now owned by PepsiCo – Red Rock Deli chip brand. Celoni said that the added value aspect of Red Rock helped PepsiCo get into the commodities space. Red Rock has opened a few doors in terms of categories that PepsiCo is trying to enter.

Credit: Shutterstock.com

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

“[We] need to make ourselves indispensable, by growing categories,” said Celoni. “We need to front up to retailers and see how we can drive more penetration, more frequency – high average-weight-ofpurchasing dollars. “[PepsiCo] needed a product in the premium segment and our US colleagues talked about [Red Rock] and what it was doing from a category perspective. It was all about the increase in dollars per kilo, the brand, and the pack architecture that we were able to mobilise to create value and different price points. They saw an interest in it, so we sent some over and did some consumer tests. It resonated with some of the retailers and created value and off it went.”

And it’s not only what Celoni calls PepsiCo’s indulgent portfolio of products that it is looking to expand, but it has recently delved into the healthy snack market. Again, branding is the key, especially when trying to get into Asia.

Celoni makes no apologies that the sugar-rich fare PepsiCo is known

for will still be the mainstay of its business, but they realise that category expansion is key to any successful business going forward.

“We do see opportunities in the health and nutrition space, in what we call adjacencies,” he said. “It’s growing in double digit and it’s a segment that is reaching the billion-dollar mark, certainly in the snacking space.”

PepsiCo has recently acquired Bare Foods, which produces baked fruits; Health Warrior, which makes nutritious snacks and bars; and Muscle Milk, a protein shake brand manufacturer.

He said the company has gotten rid of some of its arrogance by realising it can’t do everything itself. Thus the foray into the health food sector.

“We’ve looked for what I would call, ‘best-in-class manufacturers’ that can make quality products,” he said.

“And we thought about how we think about from a category expansion perspective in terms of capabilities.

“So, we entered into health nutrition [sector] with Sun Bites, and we are doing more work with Off the Eaten Path, which is a brand being launched by the retailers in the health and nutrition space. It’s all anchored in making sure we give our consumers the right choice. We will continue to do more of that because obviously that is what we are asking for at the moment.”

Both men agree that Australia is heading in the right direction with its food exports, but that maybe the sector as a whole can do a little bit more to make sure it is making the most of the opportunities available. Being organised is the key, said Celoni.

“It’s about getting the right pipeline and getting in on consumer needs…and making sure our supply chain footprint and all the work we do with our farmers [is sound],” he said. “Ninety-five per cent of our production for our locally made products are sourced in Australia.

“That will continue into the future. With the 500-odd farmers we work with either directly or indirectly, we see a real source of growth, but we have to get a lot more meticulous in the way we plan.” F

www.foodmag.com.au | August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 17

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NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Maximum positioning flexibility with six degrees of freedom Beckhoff’s Uwe Prüßmeier, senior product manager drive technology, discusses the unique value proposition of the Xplanar drive system.

T

he ground-breaking XPlanar system from Beckhoff offers boundless potential for streamlining production machines and plant design. It utilises planar movers that float freely over floors of planar tiles that can be arranged in any kind of pattern.

What characterises the new XPlanar drive system is that it is based on the principle of flying motion. Like the XTS linear transport system, XPlanar is much more than just a drive system – it’s a solution designed to make product transport flexible. Compared to XTS, XPlanar adds movement in a second dimension and allows the movers floating over floor tiles to overtake one another and to be held in buffer zones or to bypass them. The free-floating planar movers also have a further important advantage – because of the contactless drive principle, they are silent and completely wear-free.

So, what kind of functionality does this system provide for implementing transport tasks?

“Basically, a transport system simply moves products from one processing station to the next – from A to B, then from B to C, from C to D, and so on,” said Prüßmeier. “With XPlanar, these stations need neither to be in a linear arrangement, nor visited in a fixed sequence. This means that a given product need only travel to those stations that are essential for processing it. By incorporating the second dimension, XPlanar opens up several other options, too, including the ability to discharge individual movers from the production flow, or to create special waiting zones in order to optimise processing sequences.

Enabling faster movers to overtake slower movers is also important, as it allows sub-processes to be executed swiftly, in parallel. Not only is each planar mover controlled individually, as a single servo axis, it can also be synchronised precisely with other movers if necessary.”

The movers can also travel with six degrees of freedom. They not only travel to processing stations, they can also move into them. They can turn, rotating the payload they are carrying through all three axes so that it can be processed or inspected easily from any side. The movers can also be raised or lowered slightly and even tilted.

For example, a little tilt can be useful to prevent spills when accelerating quickly while carrying a container full of liquid.

In spite of all the complex motion options that XPlanar supports, the system is simple to set up and deploy from a user standpoint.

“Right at the start of the development process, we decided it was important that the system should

Uwe Prüßmeier said the XPlanar is designed to make product transport flexible.

XPlanar is simple to set up and deploy.

be highly integrated and that users would only have to plug in two cables – one for data communication over EtherCAT G and another for power supply,” said Prüßmeier. “As a result, all other functionality has been fully incorporated into the modules. Designwise, they are also extremely compact – the distance between the working surface of each planar tile and the carrier frame beneath it is just 4cm.”

The system builds on one basic component – a planar tile measuring 24 x 24cm. The tiles can be arranged in any floor or track layout. In addition to this standard tile, there will be another version in the future, identical

in shape and size, over which planar movers can rotate through a full 360 degrees – that is to say, infinitely. The movers available differ only in terms of their size and their load-carrying capacity. They currently range from 95mm x 95mm for payloads up to 0.4kg, through to 275mm x 275mm, for a maximum payload of 6kg.

The TwinCAT software also plays a key part in the system’s ease of use.

“Our main objective is to make sure that users find the planar motor system easy to manage,” said Prüßmeier. “In TwinCAT, the planar movers appear as simple servo axes, capable, in principle, of supporting

all six degrees of freedom. However, given that the degree of flexibility available with six axes is not always needed from a practical perspective – or, at least, not throughout the XPlanar system – TwinCAT provides a way to reduce this complexity. It does this by representing each mover as a one-dimensional axis capable of optional additional movements in other dimensions – lifting, tilting and turning, for instance – that are available when it reaches a processing station. This means it’s enough, initially, to just set the desired route, or track, across the XPlanar floor. This simplifies operation significantly.”

And how important is TwinCAT Track Management when implementing complex motion sequences?

A key factor in XPlanar’s flexibility is that its ability to transport products

www.foodmag.com.au | August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 19

NEW TECHNOLOGIES

XPlanar opens up new avenues in machine and system design. is not confined to the aforementioned single tracks, according to Prüßmeier.

Users can define additional tracks, and movers can switch between them.

To keep things simple for users, even when operating multiple tracks, TwinCAT offers Track Management, a user-friendly tool designed to support complex motion sequences, including the ability to overtake slower movers on the same track, or to accumulate movers in waiting zones. To do this, it allows users to define parallel lanes, bypasses, or tracks to other plant areas on the XPlanar floor.

Track Management allows movers to switch smoothly from one track to another via a short parallel segment.

All this takes is a “switch track” command, without users having to deal with the specifics of merging in and out of the flow, or avoiding collisions.

Movers can also be positioned with freedom, without having to follow any preset tracks. Using Track Management, they are sent to specific coordinates within the defined XPlanar floor space – again, without any risk of colliding with other movers.

According to Prüßmeier, there are plenty of advantages for the users for building a XPlanar floor from individual tiles.

“Here, too, we put flexibility front and centre,” he said. “The tiles can be arranged in any shape – and even wall- or ceiling-mounted – so the XPlanar system can be configured to perfectly suit a given application’s requirements. For instance, you can leave gaps within the tiled floor to

accommodate processing stations, or lay tracks around plant components.

This means users can set up a transport system in a cost-optimised fashion and, at the same time, reduce machine size to a minimum. In addition, it’s easy to modify the planar motor system subsequently just by adding more tiles when necessary, that is, to accommodate new processing stations or gain extra space to optimise motion through curves.”

And how can users best exploit this innovation’s potential? According to Prüßmeier, XPlanar opens up new avenues in machine and system design.

Users need, literally, to experience the system’s new possibilities hands-on in order to grasp them, so at market launch Beckhoff is offering easy-touse starter kits, just as it did with XTS. “These consist of 6 or 12 planar tiles installed on a carrier frame, along with 4 movers and a small control cabinet with an industrial PC, complete with preinstalled software, and the requisite electrical components,” said Prüßmeier. “This offers machine builders an ideal basic kit on which to trial XPlanar in their own environments and then go on to use later in real-life applications.

In addition, offering this kind of preconfigured system makes it a lot easier for the Beckhoff support staff to answer any questions that might arise.

Prüßmeier also said that there are almost no limits on using it with production plants and machines. The only requirement is that a product’s weight and volume are within the

20 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

limits of what the planar movers can carry. Where this applies, users can benefit from all the system’s flexible positioning capabilities. These are particularly interesting in sectors with special requirements in terms of hygiene and cleanability, zero emissions, or low noise.

This is the case in the food and pharmaceuticals industry, as well as in laboratory environments or processes that require a vacuum (in semiconductor production, for instance). The latter two sectors in particular can benefit from the fact that products are carried on floating movers, abrasion- and contaminationfree. Depending on the needs of a given application, users can also apply plastic, stainless-steel foil or glass plates to the XPlanar surfaces to make them easy to clean without residue.

XPlanar was first exhibited at the SPS IPC Drives show in Nuremberg in November 2018, with the product attracting interest among visitors.

“It also spawned lots of ideas for possible applications, because many users have been looking for a flexible solution to solve specific transport problems in their production facilities for years now,” said Prüßmeier.

He gives an example from food processing.

“In the production of high-quality confectionery, there are always minor deviations in the colour of chocolate coatings,” he said. “This is not a problem as such, provided there’s no variance within individual boxes of chocolates. However, at a production

rate of 100 chocolates per minute, selecting 10 individual chocolates with the same colour for each pack is difficult using conventional means.

It would require using several pickand-place robots to check and sort all the chocolates, which would be costly in terms of time, floor space and throughput rate. The problem can be solved much more efficiently using individually controlled planar movers operating on a single floor. Movers transporting individual chocolates could easily sort themselves at the end of the production line according to the chocolates’ particular shade of colour. Or, if movers were designed to carry an entire box at once, each mover could automatically travel to the system ejection point for the appropriate colour of chocolate to pick up the products. Both of these approaches could be implemented much faster and, importantly, with lower space requirements than, for example, the robot solution I mentioned.”

Beckhoff has already received specific inquiries from the laboratory automation sector, where there’s interest in maximising the flexibility of analyses. For the most part, samples are tested for the same substance content, but less common analyses also need to be carried out for the purpose of individualised diagnostics.

Even with mass analysis methods, XPlanar offers a way to extract individual samples; it also creates additional quality assurance advantages by making it easy to discharge or exchange particular samples. There’s similar demand in the cosmetics industry, too. For example, in one particular case, fragrances need to be filled into selectable, customerspecific bottles that are individually labelled and packaged.

“The main difference is that the XPlanar movers don’t need a mechanical guide rail, so the system offers greater flexibility in terms of movement,” said Prüßmeier.

“At the same time, though, the mechanical guidance in XTS can be an advantage. Compared to the magnetic counterforce of the planar movers, a guide rail allows better dynamics and higher speeds in curves, especially in very tight curves, and even when carrying a payload. The specifics of a given application will ultimately determine which of the two systems is the better option. The bottom line is that XPlanar and XTS complement each other perfectly.” F

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AQUACULTURE Oxygen is a key ingredient in fish farming.

Why industrial gases are important in fish farming Fish farming, or aquaculture, is a sustainable way of increasing the supply of fish to a burgeoning world population. Industrial gases have an important part to play, according to Air Liquide.

F

ish is a nourishing, healthy food that is popular throughout the world.

However, as the planet’s population grows, fish stocks in some oceans are dwindling. One way to address this shortage is fish farms. Popular in Europe, especially Nordic countries, aquaculture also occurs throughout Australia – from the tropical north to the more temperate climes of Tasmania.

Like any commercial venture, there are many facets to make it a successful enterprise. When it comes to fish farming, an essential ingredient are various industrial

gases, which have many applications in aquaculture – from hatching the eggs through to when the final product is shipped for sale.

Air Liquide is a gas specialist that has a lot of information and experience when it comes to fish farming. Its Tasmanian sales representative, Grant Stingel, works closely with the industry, not only as a supplier of gases, but also giving advice on how much, what type and how often a certain gas needs to be applied to the various production processes.

The most prolific gas used in fish farming is oxygen. There are two

main reasons it’s needed. The most obvious is to sustain the life of the fish as they hatch and are grown.

The other is a little more interesting.

“During the production of farmed fish, one of the high cost inputs is the food,” said Stingel. “It can cost up to $2,000 a tonne or more depending on the species and feed type. Maintaining a stable level of oxygen in the tank increases the fishes’ metabolism, which in turn increases the conversion of food into fish mass. So the Feed Conversion Rate (FCR) reduces, meaning lower feed costs per kilogram of fish.

“And if you’re talking tonnes of

fish, you’re talking tonnes of food per day. In the larger aquaculture systems, maintaining stable oxygen levels in the tanks will increase production. If you can increase the growth of the fish each day by adding oxygen, this reduces the time the fish are in the water, which in turn increases efficiencies within the whole production cycle.

“Typically, modern land-based aquaculture farms use what is called a Recirculating Aquaculture System (RAS). This is essentially a water treatment plant to circulate and reuse the water. This plant uses pumps to push water through a series of

www.foodmag.com.au | August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 23

AQUACULTURE

High doses of oxygen are needed before fish are harvested. filters to help purify the water before going back into the fish tanks,” said Stingel. “Oxygen is also used in this process to produce ozone to sterilise the water.

“In the inlet water to each of the ponds or tanks, the oxygen level is elevated by injecting oxygen, typically using a pressurised oxygen dissolver, to 120 to 140 per cent of normal saturation, depending on the biomass. This ensures that the respiration demands from the fish are taken care of and a stable growing environment is achieved.”

There are other applications where oxygen is necessary. Just before the fish are harvested, whether in ponds or sea cages, higher doses of oxygen are needed due to the fish being crowded into a small amount of water within the harvest area. This ensures that the fish are not as stressed before processing, giving a better end product.

Also, in some farms, oxygen is used to supersaturate baths of water to treat the fish for pest and disease, such as sea lice.

With all the oxygen being used, what are the costs involved?

Not as much as you would think, said Stingel.

“Oxygen is typically only about one or two per cent of the cost of your production but it’s very important,” he said. “It is an essential element to the fish farming process. In some cases, oxygen can be seen as just a commodity, but oxygen used efficiently can also add benefits to

your production.

“Oxygen supply to fish farms is essential so we have engineering support available,” he said. “As far as technical support, we can calculate how much oxygen you will need for the quantity of fish in each system. Based on the calculated oxygen required, we also offer advice on the oxygen dissolving system best suited for the application. Measuring

Lowering feed costs is another reason oxygen is important in fish farming.

24 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

the efficiency of your existing oxygenation system is also something Air Liquide can offer.”

Other gases are also used once the fish have been processed.

Oxygen goes from being the hero to the enemy once the fish are ready to be sent to Australian supermarkets or exported.

“After harvest, we use other industrial gases for packaging fish products,” said Stingel. “Some aquaculture companies use Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP). This is a mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide injected and sealed inside the trays often seen on the shelf at your local supermarket.”

The carbon dioxide inhibits bacterial growth, which will increase shelf life for the end product.

The nitrogen is to displace the oxygen and also maintain the package integrity so that it looks good on the supermarket shelf.

Another industrial gas used in the processing phase is liquid nitrogen, which is used to snap freeze the fish products by sending it through a freezing tunnel, which sprays the gas onto the product. This achieves a better quality product when thawed. This

is because when a product is snap frozen, the cell structure of the food is maintained, meaning when thawed, the fish not only looks good, but tastes fresh.

“Even when it comes to the presentation of the food we can help.

For example, dry ice produced from liquid carbon dioxide is used to add a bit of theatre at serving counters in restaurants or markets,” said Stingel.

“As the dry ice thaws, vapour is formed, giving off a nice smoke effect. Dry ice is also good for keeping the product cold and fresh.”

In almost every stage in the production of fish in aquaculture systems there is potential to use an industrial gas of some type whether it is oxygen, nitrogen, argon or CO2. But the use of the various gases doesn’t stop there.

Air Liquide can also provide gases for other, practical uses.

“The other application for industrial gases is for maintaining plant and equipment,” said Stingel.

“With quite a lot of machinery involved in the process, you will also need oxygen and acetylene for heating and cutting, argon gas mixtures for welding, and LPG for heating and maybe also powering forklifts.” F

Solid and perforated bake oven belts for reliable, versatile, and efficient continuous baking IPCO is world-leading manufacturer of solid and perforated carbon steel bake oven belts and a company whose partnership with the bakery industry extends back almost 100 years.

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BELTS

Solid and perforated steel bake oven belts IPCO bake oven belts have a long history in the food industry, and can help save time and money for its clients. Food & Beverage Industry News explains.

Up to 25 per cent of energy consumption can be used heating the conveyor belt in a bake oven.

I

PCO offers a range of steel-grade belts to suit different needs and environments. IPCO 1100C grade is a carbon-steel product that is used by the bakery industry, while IPCO 1200SA is a stainless-steel grade suitable for applications such as food conveying, cooling, freezing and drying. Both are available either in solid form or perforated. IPCO also offers belt grades suitable for special needs, such as resistance to corrosion or abrasive materials.

However, it is important to note that the material, or grade, is only the start of the story. Production of a belt requires the necessary mechanical properties of flatness and straightness to be engineered into the belt. The belt must also be able to transfer the heat from the heating media to the product in an even way. This means the colour of the belt surface is important. Consistent belt colour will maximise heat transfer and ensure an even bake. Specific heat treatments are therefore applied during the production process.

In terms of supply, IPCO can provide as much, or as little input, as an oven builder requires. This can be as straightforward as belt supply through to various levels of technical

advice, or consultancy to ensure that the belt delivers maximum return on investment, as well as key conveyor components such as tracking systems and graphite stations ensure smooth operation. For instance, in cases of complete belt upgrades, moving from mesh to solid or perforated steel, IPCO will often supply all conveyor components – sheaves, bearings, framework and all other required accessories.

Wide belts for enhanced productivity One area of increasing interest to many oven builders is IPCO’s ability to produce bake oven belts up to 3,500mm wide. This makes it possible to build wider ovens, increasing productivity without having to invest in factory extensions or new facilities. An oven with a 1,500mm-wide belt offers almost twice the productivity of one with an 800mm belt without any increase in the line length. An upgrade to an oven with a 3,200mm belt or larger, will increase throughput by a factor of four. The use of a steel belt of any size also has the potential to reduce baking times. The combination of a steel belt’s heat transfer qualities

26 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

and comparatively low weight often means that belt speed can be increased, cutting baking time by as much as 25-30 per cent.

Reducing carbon footprint through energy efficiency Bake ovens can account for as much as 45 per cent of a bakery’s overall energy consumption and as much of 25 per cent of this is used heating the conveyor belt. The bake oven belt can, therefore, have a major impact on overall energy costs so ensuring maximum efficiency here is important.

A solid-steel bake oven belt weighs 30 per cent less than a comparable mesh belt and therefore costs up to 30 per cent less to heat.

And perforated belts weigh as much as 35 per cent less again.

As well as cutting heating costs, this weight advantage also means less energy is needed to drive the belt through the oven.

Apart from these energy savings, steel belts are also easier to clean being flat and smooth. This not only delivers savings in water and detergent but also means greater overall productivity, with time spent baking instead of cleaning.

And there’s an additional point worth making: these benefits don’t just apply to baking. IPCO belts are used across the food industry for cooling, freezing, cooking, forming and drying.

IPCO Australia enhanced technical and service support throughout Oceania IPCO held the grand opening of its new Melbourne (Burwood Industrial Park) headquarters on July 9th.

The company is owned by FAM AB, which is part of the Swedish Wallenberg group, and has production facilities in the Americas, Asia and Europe and a worldwide technical service for quick response wherever and whenever it’s needed.

As a partner to the bakery industry since 1925, the company has built long-term partnerships with both OEMs and end customers.

IPCO engineers have a wealth of experience in supporting the bakery industry and can deliver the most appropriate solution for any requirement whether it is a new installation, an upgrade to an existing facility (from wire mesh to a solid or perforated belt), or simply supplying a replacement belt. F

INSTRUMENTATION

Aeration in fish farming AMS is a company that specialises in mass-flow controllers. Food and Beverage Industry News explains why this type of instrumentation is important in the aeration in salmon fish farms.

F

ish consumption is rising.

With the increase of the world population and the need for nutritious food, health-conscious consumers are looking for alternatives to “a nice slice of meat”. And they end up eating more fish or vegetarian food.

Specific species of wild fish are getting scarce in open water due to the impact of industrialised fishing fleets and overfishing. In a trend towards sustainable food production, fish farming is gaining increasingly interest.

Fish farming is the aquatic version of farming cows, sheep or chicken. For many years, humans have been farming food by having it grown in greenhouses, stables, or fields. Fish farming is heading in the same direction.

When people hear about fish farms, they might think of an aquarium, a little pond or a floating net. But in Norway, a major player in fish farming, people think on a larger scale. A typical fish cage near the Norwegian coast has a diameter of tens of metres containing 200,000 to 300,000 salmon. In the near future, these designs will upscale to one or two million salmon. In Norway, at the beginning of 2018, more than 3,500 cages for fish farming were floating in the sea.

The country is expanding its knowledge and technology across the world, where people are interested in large-scale harvesting of fish in the sea – and maybe on land.

Salmon is a typical example of a fish that can be fish farmed. They need cold water – 7˚C-9˚C is what they like most, which is why this aquaculture is

happening in the Northern Hemisphere, off-shore in the fjords. Salmon is a popular fish so there is a high demand.

Aeration In fish farming, aeration is of vital importance. In addition to food, the fish need oxygen that is supplied in the form of tiny air bubbles – aerated – to the water. But aeration has other advantages, too.

In the early days, the salmon suffered from infestations of lice.

Since salmon lice had an impact on harvest, the fish farmers had to look for solutions. For some reason – maybe it was an experiment or it happened by accident – the farmers started to purge air from the bottom of the cage.

And they observed that the movement of the fish started to change.

Instead of circling day in and day out – as salmon normally do – they started to move around the cage and became more agile. If the salmon are more agile, their muscles have to work more. This results in their meat being of better quality.

At the same time, the fish farmers detected that aeration helped them to create a more thermal friendly water environment. With an advantageous temperature, conditions and amount of oxygen, this resulted in a decrease in lice numbers. So aeration had two advantages: improving the salmon quality, and reducing the unwanted lice.

Aeration of fish farms using mass flow controllers The process of aeration is simple. The air bubbles can be generated by natural

A fish cage can house up to 300,000 salmon.

28 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

water currents (off-shore, down-hill), pumps, impellers, variable area flow meters or by mass flow controllers and compressors.

A compressor generates compressed air from the surrounding atmosphere, and feeds this to the mass flow controller for controlled aeration of the water in the fish cages.

To run fish farms that are remotely controlled and without much manpower, automation is needed. This includes automated feeding. When the fish are fed, the air purging needs to be interrupted to give the fish the opportunity to hunt for the food before it floats out of the cage. In between the feeding periods, the aeration improves the condition of the water and the salmon.

It helps that mass flow controllers are remotely controlled from the control room at land. The aeration is stopped when the feeding starts, and when the feeding is over, the previous set point will automatically return and the water condition is as stable as it was before.

Mass flow controllers provide a potential for saving energy due to better conditions in the cage. The accuracy of the devices is important.

Every cubic metre of air saved by the device being accurate – faster control or opening of valves – is of direct influence to the costs for running a compressor. In stormy weather, fish farmers can reduce the aeration, but during a long dry period without water movement, more air bubbles are needed. So essentially, this accuracy

and flexibility leads to a better controlled environment.

With Mass-Stream mass flow controllers, farmers have a robust instrument, which is performing well in the harsh surroundings. By the manufacturer’s Bronkhorst’s standards, this kind of aeration is high flow.

Typical air flows for a fish cage are in the range between 600 and 1,400 litres per minute.

Mass flow controllers for other types of aeration Mass flow controllers are suitable for other types of aeration in aquaculture and agriculture. If users farm salmon, they need to breed the fish, which normally occurs on land.

Fish eggs and young fish are even more vulnerable to changes, so the environment has to be more stable than for grown fish. Depending on the type of fish, the balance of oxygen in the water is delicate and has to be controlled accurately.

In algae farming, CO2 gas is one of the food components for these species to grow, which needs to be supplied under defined conditions.

A well-known application of aeration is in food and beverage industry. Every soda or carbonised drink is a liquid purged with carbon dioxide gas. Related to that, when packaging food, the packaging is purged with nitrogen to remove the oxygen before the food enters the packaging, as one of the steps to prolong the shelf life of the food. F

In early 2017, following a change in ownership and management, MAdE Establishment conducted a review of its records and identified circumstances where it had failed to correctly pay many of its employees. MAdE Establishment self-reported this to the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) which subsequently commenced an investigation into Jimmy Grants and the MAdE Establishment group of companies, being the Hellenic Republic, Press Club and Gazi restaurants.

Since first identifying the underpayment issues, the MAdE Establishment group has back-paid 515 current or former employees $7.83m. This amount comprised underpayments for the admitted contraventions listed below. In some cases, workers were incorrectly classified. Record-keeping laws relating to time records for some annualised salary employees were not adhered to, contributing to underpayments.

The FWO also found underpayments of about $16,000 for 9 employees at two Jimmy Grants stores. Jimmy Grants (Emporium) and Jimmy Grants (Fitzroy) incorrectly classified some workers and for some employees the wrong award was applied, resulting in underpayments of base rates for ordinary hours and a range of penalty rates.

MAdE Establishment has formally admitted to the FWO that contraventions relating to the following failures occurred and has entered into an Enforceable Undertaking (EU) with the FWO (available at www.fairwork.gov.au) committing to a number of measures to remedy the contraventions, rectify workplace practices and ensure future compliance: • failing to pay: minimum rates of pay, casual loadings, Saturday, Sunday, Public Holiday, early morning and evening penalty rates, • • •

loadings; failing to conduct annual reconciliations for those employees paid through an annual salary arrangement to ensure those employees had been properly remunerated for all accrued overtime and penalty rates; failing to make and keep part time work agreements; and failing to keep a record of start and finish times for employees on annualised salaries.

The commitments made by MAdE Establishment in the EU include: • a contrition payment of $200,000 to the Commonwealth; • committing to workplace relations training for all staff with responsibility for human resources, recruitment, on-site management or payroll functions; • completing audits for a period of three years; • implementing systems and processes to monitor compliance at all times; • registering with the FWO ‘My account’ portal; and • leaders about the importance of complying with the Fair Work Act. MAdE Establishment expresses its sincere regret and apologises for the conduct that resulted in the contraventions.

MAdE Establishment is committed to ensuring compliance with Commonwealth workplace laws and becoming a force for change in the industry.

George Calombaris, founding shareholder (shareholder 2008-current, director 2008-2018) Radek Sali, Director of MAdE Establishment (director 20 December, 2016-current, shareholder 20 December, 2016 - current) Adam Gregory, Director of MAdE Establishment (director 26 April, 2017-current, shareholder 28 August, 2017 -current)

FOOD SAFETY

Flowmeter helps with quick media changeover The possibility of contamination in beverage processing plants can be reduced with the FLOWave flowmeter. Here’s how.

F

ood safety and hygiene were in the news in June this year when eight brands of milk were recalled in Victoria and New South Wales amid fears that they had been contaminated by cleaning fluid.

Production plants need to be cleaned regularly when changing over batches or products. However, at the same time, the production process should be carried out as efficiently as possible.

The FLOWave flowmeter from Bürkert Fluid Control Systems offers extended functions, including the fast and precise detection of media changeovers. As a result, production steps can be clearly separated from each other and waste can be reduced without

negatively impacting on hygiene.

The FLOWave flowmeter enables the precise detection of changeovers between different liquid types during food production.

Especially in rinsing processes, rapid differentiation between product and rinsing water, or chemicals used in the CIP cleaning processes, ensures efficient process control and a high level of quality.

The device thus continuously measures the temperatureindependent density factor. Based on this measured value, valuable products such as milk can be quickly and reliably differentiated from the cleaning liquid. Compared to conventional time-controlled processes, product waste can be

FLOWave meters work according to Surface Acoustic Waves (SAW).

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FOOD SAFETY

minimised and costs saved. In addition, the amount of waste water treatment required is reduced as less product enters the waste water.

The flowmeter works according to the SAW method (Surface Acoustic Waves). This patented technology can also be used to measure the transition between beer or pre-mixed alcoholic beverages and water. FLOWave utilises the propagation speed of the surface acoustic waves in the liquid for this purpose. The speed increases with the addition of alcohol and sugar.

This also leads to an increase in the density factor of the liquid compared to water. However, the actual density of the liquid hardly changes depending on the alcohol and sugar content, since sugar increases the density while alcohol reduces it.

The transition between beer or pre-mixed alcoholic beverages and water is therefore often very difficult to measure with conventional density meters.

The density factor not only indicates the media changeover between product and water, it also differentiates between liquids with varying contents of sugar. The SAW technology allows additional data

FLOWave meters continuously measure the temperature-independent density factor. to be obtained from the medium.

In addition to the temperature, the flowmeter automatically detects possible gas bubbles and outputs the values in percentage terms.

Possible process faults can thus be eliminated quickly and effectively.

SAW technology does not require sensor elements in the measuring

Oxygen Analysers, Relative Humidity Sensors and Meters, Dewpoint Measurement

tube. This means there are no pressure drops, sealing problems or dead spaces that would otherwise interfere with cleaning.

The sensors thus meet the highest hygiene standards and facilitate the qualification and validation of production and cleaning processes.

The Bürkert flowmeter also

U.V Absorption Conductivity pH / ORP Colour

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Industrial Water Analysers and Liquid Analytical Products (pH, Conductivity, ORP, Dissolved Oxygen, etc) www.foodmag.com.au | August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 31

FOOD SAFETY

Solid grease provides peace of mind for food manufacturers Contaminants are the bugbear of any food production process. NTN has a solution that will give production managers one less thing to worry about. Food & Beverage Industry News explains.

C

ontamination of food and beverages during manufacturing is always in the back of the mind of those who run the processing factories. At any time during course of making product, plant and machinery could accidentally contaminate the goods, so it is important that best practices are in place once a production run is started.

And while best practices are a good start in keeping food and beverage items free from contaminants, there are some items that can help provide layers of protection during the production process itself.

According to precision mechanics specialist NTN-SNR,

the average cost worldwide for product recalls in the food processing industry between 2010 and 2017 was just over $16 million.

The most common reasons were foreign bodies found in the product, and contamination by allergens and/ or bacteria. With that in mind, the company has produced LP09, a foodgrade solid grease that lubricates bearings that are used in the food processing industry. It is designed to give food and beverage processors peace of mind if they are worried about bearing grease contaminating the production line. This particular grease is approved by NSF International, a US-based independent product testing, inspection and certification organisation.

32 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

“When you test your product and you find it is contaminated by foreign matter, that food needs to be scrapped and cannot be sold,” said Fabio Rebecchi, who is product manager for NTN-CBC Australia who distributes LP09 in Australia.

“One of those contaminants could be grease. Can you imagine how much that could cost a company if it fails its compliance?

“However, if a food product makes contact with LP09 solid grease, that’s fine because it complies to the NSF standards. You could ingest it without any harmful effects.

More importantly, you won’t have to scrap the product produced and start all over again.”

One aspect that needs to be

stated is that LP09 solid grease needs to be used with stainless-steel bearings that are also produced by the company, because the solid grease contains no rust inhibitor additives.

Bearings are an important part of any manufacturing facility, including those in the food and beverage sector.

NTN’s stainless-steel bearings will last up to 20 times longer than some of its competitors. And along with the LP09 grease, will do their part in making sure that a processing plant will be running at its optimum.

“It’s about peace of mind,” said Rebecchi. “This is what production and plant managers are looking for in their production processes because it not only helps guarantee their output and yield, it also leads to a

LP09 grease is ideal for lubricating bearings that are used in the food and beverage industry.

"This is what production and plant managers are looking for in their production processes because it not only helps guarantee their output and yield, it also leads to a reduction of rejects." reduction of rejects. From a consumer point of view, and as a manufacturer, they are making sure that they have a lot of it covered so the product comes out to the correct specification all the time. We are assisting and improving that process with this grease.”

Solid grease LP09 contains no rust inhibitor additives.

What it also covers is compliance.

This is something that is becoming prevalent as more standards and regulations are implemented.

Consumers not only want to know about the calories, packaging and make-up of a product, but also where it came from and where it was processed and packaged. And under what conditions.

“The food and beverage processing industry is very highly regulated and is becoming more so,” said Rebecchi. “The world needs to be fed and there is a growing population so there is more governance within the industry where manufacturers need to be 100 per cent compliant.

Plant managers will know that if they are using NSF-compliant grease from NTN then they are on their way to compliance. This opens up export markets. It’s also good as a corporation from a corporate social responsible point of view that you’re doing the right thing by the environment. You are eliminating waste. You’re producing to a standard to where your manufacturing processes are optimised all the time. This is what this grease allows you to do. Our bearings and LP09 solid grease are of very high quality and designed for specific solutions,” he said. “That is where our customers can get involved with our engineering and sales people for specific solutions to unique customer requirements. NTN will come up with a direct solution if possible.” F www.foodmag.com.au | August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 33

SUSTAINABILITY

Sustainability at core of Cookers Bulk Oil’s business Cookers Bulk Oil not only supplies high-quality cooking oils to the food and beverage industry, it also recycles used oil for other industrial uses.

W

hile food safety is first and foremost a priority, conscientious consumers are increasingly calling for products that also meet rigorous environmental standards.

For nearly 20 years, Cookers Bulk Oil has placed sustainability at the core of its operations. The company has made it its mission to minimise its impact on the environment at every step of the supply chain. This is not just a case of making sure it reduces the amount of waste it creates, but that its running operations are also made as sustainable as possible.

With this in mind, the company provides a complete oil management solution across the broader food services industry.

Its diverse customer base ensures it is able to service small to medium businesses, right through to major corporations, with high-quality cooking oils that meet industry standards. This includes an array of outlets that serve the food and beverage industry, such as restaurants, casual dining, cafes, takeaway, hotels and fast food establishments.

The two major products sold

by Cookers are canola oil and a premium frying oil branded XLFRY Oil. In addition to a suite of other products, the company is able to manufacture blends that can suit the needs of individual customers.

The businesses’ lifecycle solution sees it source fresh Australian oil that meets industry standards. It delivers the oil via a fleet of trucks, which also pick up used oil that is converted into other, reusable commodities, such as biodiesel.

Garry Nash, general manager of sales at Cookers Bulk Oil, said the business initially started out with a

focus on kitchen efficiencies. Over time, Cookers Oil increased its scope with recyclable solutions for oil management as sustainability became a focus for procurement.

“It’s really important for our customer base that they not only know where their oil has come from, but also where it’s going,” said Nash.

“When we pick up customers’ oil, they know that it’s coming back to our depots to be refined and given a second life in the biodiesel industry. That full circle approach helps a business understand and implement best practice.”

The company works with Australian oil manufacturers to refine products locally. One of the company’s key offerings is the use of storage units instead of tins, preventing 300 tins from ending up in landfill for each truck of oil delivered. Nash said that there are a couple of benefits to this outcome – less impact on the environment, plus cost savings by not having to pay gate fees at the local landfill.

“Procurement teams in this day and age want a more sustainable approach to how they deal with their oils,” he said. “So, the fact that our model removes packaging and tins of oil from the supply chain is a really big tick.”

Each delivery is accompanied with a certificate of analysis to support traceability for customers.

Food service organisations are supplied with purpose-built storage units and a business development manager to meet their requirements.

“We batch track every drop of oil that we deliver knowing the date we delivered it, what the product was and what the batch was, all the way back to when we received it.”

Cookers’ key point of differentiation in the food market is

34 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

that it holds Safe Quality Food (SQF) accreditation for oil supply in Australia.

SQF is a globally recognised food safety program that reinforces its commitment to safety standards in the industry.

Nash said SQF holds Cookers to a high account for its product traceability

Part of Cookers Bulk Oil’s focus is on recyclable solutions for oil management.

– an issue that has become topical with product recalls.

He says product dilution is also another food industry issue that Cookers seeks to alleviate with transparent processes, as the company allows unannounced audits.

“Our business policy is our doors are always open to our customers and that means

SUSTAINABILITY

if they were to knock on the door unannounced, our warehouses can be walked through and viewed by anyone at any time and that is a requirement of SQF,” he said.

“It’s one thing to have a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) certification, but we feel that SQF is one step above that.”

Cookers also holds an International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC). ISCC covers comprehensive sustainability requirements to monitor greenhouse gas emissions and ensure products are traceable and produced in an environmentally responsible manner.

The used oil that returns to the depots is decrumbed, dewatered and heat treated to create a finished product sold off into biodiesel.

The company ensures its own operations are sustainable by harvesting and reusing rainwater at its sites, measuring and analysing its greenhouse emissions and using a wind turbine at its head office to supply 30 per cent of its factory power needs.

“We don’t just talk about sustainability, but live it and breathe it as a business ourselves,” Nash said. Nash also said that Cookers offers a national footprint with nine

depots across Australia and the same service model and offering available around the country.

He said that Cookers Bulk Oil will continue to evolve its business to ensure it keeps pace with the ever changing industry practises and expectations.

“We think the amount of experience we have in the industry, and the investment that’s gone into the business to attain the certifications we do have, ensures customers can be comfortable that we will look after their oil management,” Nash said. F

Cookers Bulk Oil can manufacture oil to suit a customer’s needs.

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INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

Integration and ease of use key to cloud solution Unleashed is a cloud solution that can integrate inventory all in one place and in real time.

Food and Beverage Industry News talks to Unleashed’s Danielle Dadello to find out more.

The Unleashed cloud solution can help manufacturers calculate how much a finished product is going ot cost.

M

anaging inventory in real-time is just one of the key features of Unleashed software, which is a cloud-based platform that is well suited to manufacturers within the food and beverage industry.

Marrying the costs of raw materials and the final products can be timeconsuming. Unleashed has made it easier.

“Unleashed is an inventory management system that not only tracks products coming in from purchase orders for food manufacturers and for sales, but it also captures the average costs so we can give real-time margins and profits to customers,” said Unleashed’s New Zealand country manager, Danielle Dadello. “With the manufacturing piece sitting in the

middle, we know the purchase price and the average landed price of the product and therefore, each of the components or ingredients going into the finished product.”

Unleashed can calculate how much a finished product is going to cost.

It can also include things like labour costs and any additional costs in the manufacturing of products. If an item is manufactured externally by another company the software will add in the costs in real time.

Unleashed also has the ability to be integrated into the accounting software package Xero, which Dadello said is popular with its customer base. Any financial movements from purchase orders to sales orders, credits and other financial transactions can be passed from one platform to the other.

36 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

“Another highlight of Unleashed that is quite popular at the moment is B2B done in-house, where a customer can use the software to set up a B2B portal,” said Dadello. “It is possible to set up the portal to be invite-only, or it can have guest customers, so users don’t have to be logged in. But you do have to send the link of the website to the customer – it is not something you can just Google. The customer can go in and see a catalogue that is suited to them. It has a list of all the products they have purchased, with the purchase price, so they can set up pricing in the background. “ Wastage is a bugbear of many food and beverage processing factories.

It is inevitable that with various batches, there will be waste of the raw ingredients or as a by-product of the

final merchandise. Unleashed has a way of streamlining this process, and allows users to set up parameters such as expiry dates so the manufacturer can make sure a product is used before its use-by date arrives.

“For food and beverage manufacturing, it is really critical to have serial and batch tracking so you can see the batches coming in from the supplier and their expiry dates,” said Dadello. “During the manufacturing process, users can track the sales orders going out the door. This means that at any given time, if there happens to be a product recall, you can manage that. You can also manage all of the stock you currently have on hand such as what is going to expire soon so you can quickly get it out the door, or use it, or manage it in a way that

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

you’re not wasting it.”

It takes the guess work out of whether a raw material or batch is no longer fit to be put on a supermarket shelf. Unleashed will also give users prompts if a batch is about to expire.

“On the dashboard, by default, it says there is going to be a number of batches expiring in the next couple of weeks or days. It is on the dashboard, so it’s the first thing you see when you log in,” said Dadello. “They will turn red if it is going to be soon.

Anything that has already expired will also be in red.”

Unleashed also has a stock-taking feature, which is critical to keep up to date especially if a manufacturer is using multiple warehouses.

“I see a trend in food and beverage manufacturing whereby if you are not warehousing product yourself it is quite common to have a third party doing it,” said Dadello.

Users often don’t touch the stock, or maybe they only capture the finished product. Unleashed often sees businesses get into trouble when they purchase stock, which they send to a third party, but they have no idea what the stock levels actually are. They assume there is a certain amount and they get into trouble because when they

find that amount is wrong it can often cause friction between the business and the third party. Unleashed fixes this by having real-time information on stock levels.

“You would still keep the manufacturing relationship you have with the third-party manufacturer.

But just being able to track what you have given them, in terms of raw ingredients, and what they’ve said in terms of the sales side. If you’ve made 10 kegs of beer, being able to say, ‘I can sell 10 kegs of beer, because that is what my third party has just manufactured for me’, then you can make arrangements to sell it. However, if you only have five, then you have a problem. So, it is being able to have that traceability with that third party that can be a problem.”

Dadello says the payment model is subscription based, depending on individual needs. She said that back-up service is one of the main planks of the business and Unleashed has several different aspects to that part of its organisation.

The company has free email support for all users of Unleashed. People don’t have to be a user, they can be a prospect or a partner. The company is not going to turn anybody away.

Unleashed’s New Zealand country manager, Danielle Dadello, said that the cloud-based product can help with cost savings to food and beverage manufacturers.

With every new medium subscription or above, it has a free four-hour onboarding resource. It helps guide users through the tasks they need to do to help them get up and running.

That is the nature of incorporating a new system – users need to know how their current business fits into the new system. And it’s not something

that can easily be documented.

Every business is slightly different.

“We also have an additional offer that is paid training and paid phone support. We have a lot of partners in our network that can come onsite or do remote work to train and implement support sources, but they are external to Unleashed.” F

Food processing is just the tip of the iceberg • Innovation programs • Business consulting • Master planning • Waste water • Renewables • Feasibility • Logistics • Funding Look below the surface and see how we can help your business.

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www.foodmag.com.au August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 37

MARKET RESEARCH

Getting a jump on the opposition Mintel Purchase Intelligence could be the difference between a product being on a consumer’s radar or not. Food & Beverage Industry News explains.

M

ost new products only get one shot at the big time when they are launched.

All the money spent on marketing, promotions and ad campaigns can go down the gurgler if companies don’t do their due diligence on public perceptions, which can be fickle. Anybody remember Crystal Pepsi? McDonalds’ Arch Deluxe? How about Cosmopolitan yoghurt? Or New Coke?

Well, the last one is certainly seared into the memory banks due

to it being a colossal failure back in 1985. The others, not so much.

Bringing a new product to market is no easy task. It takes a lot of recipe tweaking, taste tests, and a fair bit of money. New Coke showed that even with the backing of a worldrenowned brand, failure is possible.

A key ingredient is market intelligence. Formed in London 47 years ago, Mintel is a company that has pioneered research in many arenas including food and beverage.

A conjoining of the words “market”

Mintel uses a huge database to get information from consumers about new products on the market.

38 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

"What attributes help them make those purchasing decisions? Quality, taste, trustworthiness of brand, fun, exciting, or environmentally friendly are just some of the 16 product attributes consumers are asked to rate." and “intelligence”, Mintel has several consumer insight tools – the latest being Mintel Purchase Intelligence, which is product comparison technology, providing rapid, reliable consumer opinion on every reported new food and drink product in the Australian marketplace.

It was developed because the company knew that manufacturers of food and beverages not only wanted to know what consumers wanted to buy, but why.

“It was developed in-house to help food and beverage manufacturers understand which products consumers want to buy and which product attributes are correlated to a purchase decision,” said Mintel’s senior purchase intelligence analyst, Megan Stanton.

“The tool goes beyond purchase intent with data and insight on the key attributes consumers care about. What attributes help them make those purchasing decisions?

Quality, taste, the trustworthiness of a brand, how fun, exciting, or environmentally friendly are they – these are some of the 16 product attributes that consumers are asked to rate.”

Manufacturers can use Purchase Intelligence in many different ways.

They can analyse how a group of products, a newly launched chocolate bar range for example, compares to the benchmark of chocolate bars already in market.

This gives manufacturers an insight on why a new product might be underperforming, and then identify areas of improvement. There might be an issue with the packaging – maybe people just don’t like the look of it. Perhaps, there is something fundamentally wrong with the way it’s getting their brand message

across. This helpful feedback is available through the words of consumers who rate the products on the Purchase Intelligence tool. The other way Purchase Intelligence can be utilised is as a go-to market tool where a manufacturer can buy what Mintel calls “concept intelligence”.

“You can buy the information as ad hoc if you are launching a new product,” said Stanton. “It gives you the opportunity to have a pre-look at what consumers would say about your product before it launches to the public, as well as benchmark your concept against products that are already in the market.”

How does the information get collected, and how does the company get feedback? Mintel has shoppers throughout the different states who look for new products that are being launched. When they find the product, they send it to Mintel headquarters in London where all the information – packaging, nutrition, type of product – is photographed and recorded and added to Mintel’s Global New Product Database. The market intelligence agency then conducts surveys on the new product, with responses then filtered through to the Purchase Intelligence tool.

“We survey 100 people on each product, a statistically reliable number,” said Stanton. “The survey is always based on the general population in Australia. We make sure we use the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures to make sure that we have a representative population.

“For example, we make sure that the population represents a certain percentage from New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and other states, and we manage also for age and gender.”

MARKET RESEARCH

Stanton said food manufacturers want to know about their products, and have an indication of the group of people who are going to buy their products. Purchase Intelligence will give them this information, as well as on other factors that will allow manufacturers to compare their product against that of their competitor’s.

“If a respondent says they would buy the product we ask them why,” said Stanton. “Conversely, if they say no, we ask them why, too. Then, we are able to filter and search through all that information to help manufacturers understand why the respondent has given a particular answer.

“There are 16 questions we ask – eg good value, quality, trustworthy brand, natural, and environmentally friendly etc to give us a gauge of what consumers think of a product.

Then, we are able to correlate which of those attributes has a strong relationship to a purchase decision.”

Useful information that Purchase Intelligence will show manufacturers includes how many Australians have the intention to purchase their product; what attributes are correlated to a purchase decision; how does that product, or group

Mintel has shoppers throughout the states who look for new products that are being launched. of products, compare to their competitors, or how it compares to a category on the whole.

Mintel’s Purchase Intelligence tool enables manufacturers to analyse the numbers or explore thousands of verbatims to learn the context of purchase decisions directly from consumers.

And how do manufacturers feel about their product being on the database? Do they have any issues

with it being compared to other, similar products?

“A lot of manufacturers are really interested in Mintel Purchase Intelligence,” said Stanton. “We’ve had a number of our manufacturing customers, including retailers, who are very interested in not only how their product is performing but their competitor’s products, too.”

Overall, the reaction in the market to the product intelligence tool has

been good, said Stanton. And she believes its reputation will grow as it gets a foothold in the market research space.

“Mintel Purchase Intelligence has been very successful in the US and we’ve been there for just over three and a half years,” she said. “We launched the product intelligence tool in Australia in November of 2018 and we’ve had fantastic feedback.” F

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Redesigning packaging with reduce, reuse, recycle in mind Author

Nerida Kelton MAIP, Executive Director, Australian Institute of Packaging (AIP)

The AIP’s executive director, Nerida Kelton, explains why the 5Rs are important for consumers.

A

Reduce, reuse and recycle are the three most important areas for long-term changes when it comes to packaging design.

40 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

s a consumer, you might have heard about the “Waste Hierarchy” and the 5Rs. From a consumer perspective they are: • Refuse – do not purchase unwanted items.

• Reduce – eliminate single-use packaging wherever possible. This means declining plastic coffee cups, shopping bags, straws and buying products that are sustainable.

• Reuse products more than once.

Purchase reusable water bottles, keep-a-cups, and recyclable shopping bags • Recycle – ensure that you place your products in the recycling bins and purchase products that are recyclable.

Look for products that are using the new Australasian Recycling Label

(ARL) to better understand the true recyclability of the materials.

• R epurpose – purchase products that are made from recycled materials – consciously purchase bags, shoes, furniture, jewellery that you know is made from recycled content.

Mindsets have shifted over the last few years, and globally consumers are actively driving brands and their packaging departments to supplement sustainable packaging design to incorporate the 5Rs and to redesign with environmental impacts in mind.

Packaging technologists are being asked to reconsider the outcomes of their packaging design all the way across the supply chain from manufacturing to recycling, and also consider a closed-loop and more circular approach. Packaging

design can no longer be linear.

When discussing the waste hierarchy from a packaging design perspective, reduce, reuse and recycle are the three most important areas for long-term changes as they are the preventative measures with the highest level of impact.

Achievable steps for packaging technologists can include redesigning the shape and size of a product, reducing thickness and weight of materials, shifting to recyclable materials, and developing a closed-loop system for products.

However, any adaptations to the packaging design, structure and form must not compromise the ultimate purpose of packaging, which is maintain the ability to protect, preserve, contain, communicate and transport a product to the consumer.

First and foremost, packaging must remain fit-for-purpose before any structural changes are made to a pack. The AIP encourages all packaging teams to undertake a lifecycle assessment where possible before any pack is altered. A redesign feature of packaging that consumers are embracing is reuse whereby a customer can refill their products using the same packaging.

“Mindsets have shifted over the last few years, and globally consumers are actively driving brands and their packaging departments to align their sustainable packaging design to incorporate the 5Rs and to redesign with environmental impacts in mind."

It is important to note that reusable containers have less impact on the environment than one that is single use. Packaging technologists need to re-imagine their packaging for continued use and the ability to have multiple uses for the consumer.

Consumers are also driving the focus to what is really happening with packaging and the end of life.

Packaging technologists are now being asked to stop and review their packaging and find out whether it is actually being recycled or landfilled in the country it is sold in. The availability of the APCO PREP tool enables this decision making. In addition, if the material is capable of being recycled in the country in which it is sold, then consumer waste and greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced across the lifespan of the product. This in turn achieves the

2025 National Packaging Targets that all brands are working towards.

If the material is unable to be recycled, then look at the possibility of moving to a recycled content, and even the use of renewable resource raw materials. Once again, the AIP urges consumers to undertake a full lifecycle assessment if possible, before moving to recycled content to determine if this is in fact the best decision for a product.

A recent example of the reuse, refill and recycle concept that has considered the product all the way through the supply chain is Cif ecorefill. Unilever announced on its global website the launch of Cif ecorefill, the new at-home technology that allows consumers to refill and reuse their Cif spray bottles for life. Cif has worked to create a no-mess solution, becoming the first

household cleaning brand to do so with this pioneering twist and click refill design. Made with 75 per cent less plastic, Cif ecorefill attaches to the current Cif Power & Shine bottles.

Through its technology, it seamlessly releases the super-concentrated product into the bottle, which is filled with water at home. The ecorefills are 100 per cent recyclable once the plastic sleeves are removed and, by the end of 2020, the ambition is for all Cif ecorefills and spray bottles to be made from 100 per cent recycled plastic. Going smaller is certainly better – the ecorefills are lightweight and save on storage space. Diluting the product at home means 97 per cent less water is being transported, fewer trucks on the road and less greenhouse gas emissions.

Every day, more companies are announcing refillable packaging solutions including cosmetics and beauty, toiletries such as shampoo and soaps, cleaning products and beverages. The journey to sustainable packaging has only just begun and it is exciting to see what innovative designs packaging technologists are working on that address reduce, reuse, refill and recycle. F

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FOOD & BEVERAGE INDUSTRY AWARDS

SPONSORED BY

Food & Beverage Industry Awards’ winners announced Innovation and sustainability were the stars of the Food & Beverage Industry Awards’ night.

T

hursday July 18 was a great night at Doltone House in Sydney for the 16th annual Food & Beverage Industry Awards.

It was an occasion where a lot of the nominees and winners thought outside the box – whether it was a new food or beverage product, innovative packaging, or plant and machinery that made a difference to the processing of food and beverages. Over the next few pages, we list the nominees, celebrate the winners, and give a pat on the back to all those who think outside the box and make this such a fascinating industry.

BEST OF THE BEST AND INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY OF THE YEAR Inox Australia Stock Processing Systems Inox supplied a Melbourne-based company with a beef, chicken, seafood and vegetable stock processing system that provided the customer with increased yield and improved

processing time (from 12 hours down to two hours). It also included a heat recovery system to provide heated water for the fully automated Clean in Place (CP) system that cleans the process system ready for the next batch.

Taking about seven months to bring to fruition, features of the system include a single user operational interface; safe and ergonomic handling of the product during the process from start to finish; hygienic design of the process including zero wastage of product at end of production; and improved yield of raw materials by pressure processing instead of traditional atmospheric process.

“It’s an automatic system that allows you to run it for a couple of hours, and then come back and it’s all done,” said Inox managing director, Robert Becher.

“It started off as a bespoke system, but things come up, things happen, and so we adapt the design to fit the purpose.”

All materials used are stainlesssteel 304SS and 316SS grade and built from scratch by Inox.

The system works by putting up to 1000kg of raw materials into a stainless-steel basket, which is lifted by electric hoist into the automatically opening pressure vessel. Water is filled into the vessel to the required volume set by the

Inox Australia’s stock processing system offers safe and ergonomic handling of products during the production cycle.

42 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

Inox Australia’s managing director Robert Becher (left) with Flavour Makers northern sales manager, Rowan Barnes. touchscreen operational interface.

The process is fully automatic to the set parameters and alarmed when the process is completed. Following the cooking procedure, the CIP water is circulated through the vessel heating jacket, which serves two purposes. The first is to cool the cooking vessel to a temperature that allows the product to be discharged. Second, the heat recovered from the cooking vessel is used to heat up the cleaning water, therefore no external heating of the cleaning water is needed.

The liquid stock is then pumped through a special design filtration system to a holding tank that is ready for the product to be received by the external filling line. The basket is removed from the vessel, the waste product is dumped into a hopper underneath the basket ready to be removed by forklift to the external waste disposal bin.

Following this, the basket is cleaned within the vessel during the CIP process and does not exit the food processing room at any point ensuring that the equipment is cleaned and

cannot be contaminated externally.

“I am speaking to several companies about a similar system both in Australia and Asia,” said Becher. “One of the things that opens peoples’ eyes is the cleaning part of it. Also, the energy efficiency part of it has impressed people whereby we use heat that usually dissipates into the atmosphere for another purpose. The second thing is, we reduce the production time drastically. They used to run two shifts to do every batch, but now they are doing it in half a shift. This means they can double their output in half the time.”

INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY OF THE YEAR FINALISTS Operations Feedback Systems – OFS-X & OFS-Flow Pollen Consulting Group – Digital Twin Trust Codes – QR/NFC codes that provide traceability CSIRO – shockwave technology

FOOD & BEVERAGE INDUSTRY AWARDS

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India, it is pumped out into the water to the detriment to the environment.

All of this water that is coming out of these plants can be cleaned up and converted into clean, green drinking water.”

More than 70 per cent of the Earth is covered in water, and of this water, 2 per cent is trapped in glaciers, and only 0.4 per cent is drinkable and needs to be shared across seven billion people, which is why this product can make a difference in developing countries where clean drinking water is not readily available.

Some of the world’s largest aquifers are now polluted and overused and are drying up faster than they are being replenished. Botanical water taps into an otherwise unused and often discarded new source of water, making it one of the world’s most sustainable, cost effective and environmentally friendly water source.

CEO of AquaBotanical, David Driver (left), and Kevin Cole, territory manager for New South Wales and Queensland for Rockwell Automation.

BEVERAGE OF THE YEAR Aqua Botanical Beverages AquaBotanical Botanical Water is the world’s first natural plant-based drinking water.

It is a new category of water and has won global beverage awards for Best Technology Innovation, Best CSR Initiative, Best New Water Concept, Best Sustainability Initiative and Best New Drink Concept. It is one of those concepts where people wonder, “why hasn’t anybody thought of this before?”

AquaBotanical is committed to ensuring that it can bring plant-based water to everyday Australians.

Its globally patented Botanical Water Technology (BWT) converts the aqueous liquid (waste) from fruit and vegetable concentrate and sugar-milling into clean, green and safe drinking water.

It is bottled in glass under the company’s AquaBotanical brand, but importantly, the technology can be scaled through installation in existing juice extraction facilities.

After many years of research, AquaBotanical’s inventor, Dr Bruce Kambouris, found a way to harvest the naturally occurring water found in fruit and vegetables. Kambouris combined intuition with science to

produce natural water made from plants and in so doing coined the term “Botanical Water” to reflect its new sustainable source.

Among his many roles in business, Terry Paule is executive chairman of AquaBotanical, the company responsible for producing the water.

He was excited about the product the moment he heard about how it worked.

“As a company, we look for people like Bruce, who have a great idea, but sometimes lack the execution skills to get it over the line,” he said.

“Bruce was introduced to me by a friend of mine who had heard about the invention some years. He told me that Bruce was making water out of carrots, which intrigued me. I flew up to Mildura, met Bruce, and a year later we ended up partnering in his business.

“We soon realised that this wasn’t a small idea. It was transitional and very large disruptive idea on a global scale.”

AquaBotanical is made by harvesting surplus water extracted during the juice concentration process.

This aqueous liquid is filtered and mineralised and the end result is a great tasting clear, clean and environmentally green natural water made from plants.

Botanical water is 100 per cent natural, clean, green and safe to drink. The globally patented process guarantees that the natural

44 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

water is free from sugars, toxins, microorganisms and additives. In addition, the manufacturer believes that its plant-based Botanical Water is a healthy alternative and considered the most suitable water for vegetarians and vegans as it does not come into contact with animals or animal by-products.

The company estimates that there’s an opportunity to produce over one trillion litres of Botanical Water around the world.

“A lot of industries, such as the sugar cane industry, literally extract billions of litres of water a year from the cane plants, and throw it away,” said Paule. “Often in places like

AquaBotanical water can be obtained from sugar cane as it is being processed.

BEVERAGE OF THE YEAR FINALISTS Maltra Foods – Brod Kvas Ginscato – Ginscato Herbal Fix – herbal fix beverages Bowled Over Beverages – kȯ-fē tonic syrup Kombucha Me – Kombucha beverages Nutra Organics – Lunar Latte Margaret River Kombucha Co Pty Ltd – rok Kombucha MateCo2 – Sparkling Yerba Mate drink Brouhaha Brewery – Strawberry Rhubarb Sour

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FOOD & BEVERAGE INDUSTRY AWARDS

FOOD SAFETY EQUIPMENT & MATERIALS

SPONSORED BY

The Klarion EGS6020 replaces concentrated chemical caustics.

Spraying Systems Co Klarion EGS6020 Spraying Systems has patented a technology called Klarion, which is a machine that uses the principles of electrolytic process to produce eco-friendly solutions on-site and on-demand.

By utilising an electrical current, it is possible to separate the positive and negatively charged ions out of a sodium chlorine salt solution. The ions are pulled through ion-exchanged membranes to generate the cleaner (NaOH) and sanitiser (HOCl). The cleaner can effectively dissolve grease, oil, fat and proteins, while the sanitiser can oxidise the outer layer of bacteria and fungi, killing them in seconds.

This guarantees safe, clean and disinfected equipment and facilities for hatcheries, dairies or any other food processing company.

The Klarion cleaner replaces concentrated chemical caustics. It is twice as effective as the same amount of concentration of bleach is used. For example, 200 parts per million (ppm) of Klarion sanitiser does the work of 400ppm of bleach.

Both the cleaner and the sanitiser are residue-free.

“Most of our customers are from the food processing industry,” said product specialist Michel Fernandes.

“Most of them use different chemicals and most of the chemicals are very toxic and they are harmful for employees. There are alternatives, but they can be quite expensive or not so efficient when it comes to cleaning and sanitising.”

Klarion solutions are produced on-site and on demand and are at full potency when used. As a result, micro-organisms can be eliminated by the Klarion solutions containing lower levels of active chemicals.

In addition, the Klarion cleaner and sanitiser are non-irritating to eyes and skin and is fragrance

free. Workers don’t need to wear protection gear when cleaning.

“Some years ago, our lab came up with the idea of using just water, salt and electricity to create some chemicals,” said Fernandes. “It turned out to be successful. We’ve done some testing in the lab and it showed that the eco-friendly chemicals we use are very efficient compared to traditional, toxic chemicals. Then we had to think about how it would work in our customers’ facilities. That is where Klarion comes in to play.

“When we explain to people how it works, a lot of the time we get the reaction of, ‘What? Just with water I can make some chemicals? And those chemicals are not dangerous?’ Some think it doesn’t make sense, but the

chemistry behind it does. We don’t actually produce the chemicals, we produce the machine. The customer produces the chemicals in their own facility. The final solution that the machine produces is very safe.

“It is also good for the environment. We don’t have contaminated plastic containers lying around that some other cleaners and sanitisers need. We don’t have the problem of left-over chemicals.”

Klarion uses the principles of electrochemical activation, which boosts the potential of oxidation and the ability to dissolve oils and grease, for the sanitiser and cleaner respectively, causing them to react quickly. It means the final product can have the same efficacious performance as their traditional counterparts. As it is produced on-site and on-demand, there is no need for dilution, there is no stock of concentrated chemicals and there are no issues regarding transportation of concentrated chemicals, contaminated containers and how to dispose of them. The final solutions are residue free, as well as being drain and disposable friendly.

FOOD SAFETY EQUIPMENT & MATERIALS FINALISTS

Spraying Systems’ Michel Fernandes (left), Total Construction’s James Bolton (middle) and Spraying Systems’ Steven Barnes.

46 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

Air Liquide – Cryo Tunnel FP1+ Aligal 1 or Aligal 2 supply CRC Industries – CRC food-grade bio degreaser Lindsay PieMaking Equipment – Simple Simon pie machine Roxset Health & Safety Flooring – Roxset SE 1/2/3 Sealtick – Sealtick6086b

EARLY CONTRACTOR INVOLVEMENT With a specialist builder such as Total Construction you can avoid potential cost blow outs in your project before design and location is determined.

Contact us today to find out how we can help with construction planning for your next Food & Beverage project

CALL US TODAY ON (02) 9746 9555 OR VISIT WWW.TOTALCONSTRUCTION.COM.AU

FOOD & BEVERAGE INDUSTRY AWARDS

SPONSORED BY

PA Packaging Solutions’ Patrick Mercieca (left), COG Advertising’s Natasha Thomas and PA Packaging Solutions’ Peter Cumberlege.

PACKAGING INNOVATION PA Packaging Solutions Certified home compostable paper and film barrier duplex and triplex laminated film pouch PA Packaging Solutions’ focus is on home compostable packaging, as environmental benefits are greatest when avoiding waste. It took five years of looking for the company to supply accredited and marketable home compostable barrier.

Its range of Australian-certified home compostable paper and film barrier duplex and triplex laminated film pouches is guaranteed to break down in a home compost bin within 26 weeks.

“It was something my business partner and myself had been looking at for quite some time,” said company director Peter Cumberlege. “We came across it in the UK and had the opportunity to partner up with someone who developed adhesives that could achieve the home compostable certification, so we introduced it into the Australian and New Zealand markets.”

And it is the aforementioned adhesive used in the packaging that it key.

“The certification allows us to be

standalone because of the adhesive between the laminates is what makes it all special,” said Cumberlege.

“What we have that is standalone to everybody else, is the adhesives.”

The pouch has been rigorously tested to meet the criteria for home composting and eco-toxicity – decomposing under home compost conditions in 26 weeks into safe fertile compost.

The pouch is certified TUV Austria OK Compost Home, (accreditation number S0370) and the stricter testing criteria under the

Australasian Bioplastics Association (ABA) Home Compostable (AS58102010), accreditation number ABAP 20007.

Completing further shelf-life testing, PA Packaging Solutions has shown the home compostable pouches allows equivalent, if not better, barrier and shelf life retentions for many food products.

“At the moment, there are a lot of people selling compostable film that breaks down but there are toxins in the adhesives,” said Cumberlege. “And that is where we

PA Packaging Solutions has products that decompose under home compost conditions in 26 weeks.

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get certification. It is fairly unique.

When others catch up there is enough marketshare for everybody, but it is a tough game, and this will allow us to get more buying power. We are getting a few of the bigger companies now to talk to us in a serious way.”

Home compostable pouches are made from renewable resources such as plant fibre offcuts, and sustainable trees to produce packaging that can be returned to nature after use.

The plant material is non-GMO and natural, free of chemicals and toxins, producing richer nutrient heavy soil as it decomposes. Waste is reduced, as the home compostable pouches replace today’s multilayer barrier laminate pouches that cannot be recycled.

“With our product, if it ends up in landfill, it breaks down and leaves no toxins,” said Cumberlege. “If it ends up in the water course, it will break down and leave no toxins. If it ends up in the compost – either industrial or home – it will break down and leave no toxins. In the long term, it can be the only way forward in packaging that looks after the environment.”

PACKAGING INNOVATION FINALISTS

Nutra Organics – collagen beauty bars Hemp Oz – hemp kombucha BE Campbell – perfectly balanced Mexican-style slow-cooked beef with beans Youfoodz – Youfoodz Meal Kitz

FOOD & BEVERAGE INDUSTRY AWARDS

BEST IN DESIGN Miraka Mokai Plant Maori-owned Miraka is well established in the New Zealand dairy-processing industry with strong values founded on the cultural beliefs of its owners.

Miraka’s milk supply is sourced from 107 local farms within an 85km radius of the factory, delivering farm-fresh and quality products with a global reach to more than 23 countries.

The company uses sustainable and renewable geothermal energy, resulting in the power and capacity to process more than 300 million litres of milk into powders and UHT products every year.

Using Rockwell Automation’s Pavilion8 model predictive control (MPC) software platform, Miraka has been able to optimise its milk evaporation process. Optimising this process has resulted in an estimated energy savings of greater than one per cent per tonne of milk powder during peak production. Implementing these initiatives reduces the Miraka

emissions of greenhouse gases.

“The predictive modelling module of Pavilion8 helps us to be more successful, as we are able to model the product outcomes based on changes to plant parameters,” said plant manager, Jacob Deadman.

“It provides visibility to ensure we’re going to be successful.

Rockwell Automation provides excellent support, as the team have learned how to best utilise the tools available, Rockwell has been there to help us all the way.

“Pavilion8 gives us greater control of the quality of the product.

It ensures we can enhance our yields and get more value out of our products that we’re making and delivering for our customers.

Improved yields, throughput, less input costs, and predictability of the product outcome are some of the improvements we have seen.”

When it comes to automation, the primary objective of Rockwell Automation’s MPC solution is to enhance stability in the process unit through the reduction of variability of key process parameters and optimal control to desired targets.

The system includes modules to control, analyse, monitor, visualise and integrate information and processes.

Miraka uses geothermal energy to power its plant, as well as Rockwell Automation’s Pavilion8 MPC software platform.

This system encompasses and manages dynamics and changing disturbances that occur minute by minute.

“We wanted to streamline our process to make it more efficient and more effective for our operators to run the plant to deliver what our customers require,” said Deadman.

“The automation behind this – thanks to Pavillion8 – allowed the Miraka operators more control of the processing parameters in the plant, while removing the need to adjust

parameters over the course of a production campaign.”

The evaporation process was optimised in the first phase.

Variability was reduced and total solids targeting was improved. The evaporator total solids target was lifted, resulting in better thermal efficiency across the evaporation and drying stages and increased capacity.

In the second phase, spray dryer model predictive control was commissioned. Implementation of multi-variable model predictive control on the standardising process was delivered as the final phase of the solution.

Use of multi-variable models for liquid composition control combined, with inferential models for tracking composition through the entire drying process, resulted in reduction of protein and fat variability in the final powder.

The Pavilion8 solution provided Miraka with an exceptional result.

A capacity increase of more than 4 per cent was achieved during the peak season, moisture targets were raised by 0.04 per cent, and improved protein and fat control provided the potential to reduce fat plus protein giveaway by more than 100 tonnes per year.

BEST IN DESIGN FINALISTS

Miraka plant manager, Jacob Deadman.

Texas BBQ Foods – Inglewood meatsmoking facility Coopers Brewery Maltings – Coopers maltings facility

www.foodmag.com.au | August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 49

FOOD & BEVERAGE INDUSTRY AWARDS

MEAT, POULTRY AND SMALLGOODS

cooked for 10 hours in the bag to retain all juices and flavour.

“We supply the raw materials to a company in Sydney who does the cooking and packaging under the Three River Farms Brand,” said Mark. “We see this product as one way that NCMC Foods supports farmers by continually putting any profits back into the abattoirs and back into the farmers’ pockets.”

This product requires minimal skill in preparation – empty contents into an oven dish, cover with foil and heat for 30 minutes. The long shelf life of the unopened product also allows consumers to purchase the product to have ‘on hand’ when they do not have time to cook, or will be eating alone.

NCMC Foods Slow-cooked Veal Osso Bucco with Tomato Red Wine Sauce Three River Farms Slow Cooked Veal Osso Bucco with Tomato Red Wine Sauce is owned by NCMC Foods, part of The Northern Co-Operative Meat Company, which in turn is owned by over 1,000 farmer members. Being a co-operative, all profits are returned to the farmers, or directed back into the abattoir.

The idea for the pre-packaged meal came from the company’s research and development team working in conjunction with Woolworths Meat Division, according to NCMC general manager Mark Manning.

“We sat down and did a taste testing with the Woolworths’ team before settling on the tomato red wine sauce” he said. “It’s perfect to eat this time of year. It’s easy and convenient to cook.”

The veal is sold in selected

MEAT, POULTRY AND SMALLGOODS FINALISTS

Mark Manning, general manager of NCMC Foods.

Woolworths stores and is made with premium Australian veal shanks, which are portion cut and slow cooked in a rich red wine sauce.

This product is the first ready-to-

NCMC Foods’ veal shank is cut into meal-size portions.

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eat, slow-cooked veal shank to the Australian market. The veal shank is cut into meal size portions, placed in a bag with a tomato red wine sauce and sealed. The product is slow

Texas BBQ Foods – Smoked brisket Country Cooked Meats - The Standard Meat Co –Italian-style meatballs in Napoli sauce BE Campbell – perfectly balanced beef, sweet potato and kale meatballs

FOOD & BEVERAGE INDUSTRY AWARDS

Lori’s Wholesome Pantry’s owner Lori Phillips.

INGREDIENT INNOVATION Lori's Wholesome Pantry Watermelon Seed Butter Lori’s Wholesome Pantry is an Australian owned and operated health food manufacturer. It produces healthy snacks and blends that are as close to nature as possible with minimal processing. Organic watermelon seed butter has been developed as a healthy alternative to a chocolate spread. It is similar to a nut butter but made out of seeds instead of nuts and has a subtle chocolate flavour.

“I’m always looking at trends and looking to grow trends,” said Lori Phillips, who founded the company.

“I read somewhere that 2019 was going to be the year of seed butters and I wanted to create a product that was unique. I looked into it, explored it and started trialling it and came up with a butter alternative that the whole family can enjoy.”

The company has used both organic sprouted watermelon seeds and organic tiger nuts (tuber) instead of nuts to create a chocolate spread alternative. Watermelon seeds are high in protein and are gluten and nut free so they are a good option for gluten-free and nut-free cooking.

Tiger nuts are a tuber vegetable and contain resistant starch that contributes to dietary fibre. A lot of research and time was invested into finding a unique ingredient that was not used in a spread or other food product in Australia. The company looked into trialling this product

by purchasing it on a retail level.

Once the trials were confirmed, the company then managed to find a wholesaler overseas and worked with them to export a pallet of watermelon seeds to Australia. The seeds went through testing abroad prior to arriving into Australia.

“The seeds are sourced from overseas,” said Phillips. “The seeds are dried in the sun, and the black part of the seed is taken off leaving the white part. They then dehydrate the seeds at a low temperature.”

The seeds themselves are high in protein, but are of low calories, and they have the same nutritional value as pumpkin seeds. They also have the anti-oxidant lycotene. The watermelon seeds themselves make up 25 per cent of the product that is sold on the shelf.

“It also has a lot of healthy aspects.

It is allergen-free, gluten-free and is an alternative to other spreads out there,” said Phillips.

JUDGES IMPRESSED

BY NOMINATIONS Innovation was the key word used by several of the judges at the 2019 Food and Beverage Industry Awards.

“It was great to see a lot of this year’s entries focus on premium products and also new ingredients,” said Rod Arenas, FIAL general manager, commercial.

“This year there has been a huge demand for food and beverages globally and we have seen a huge amount of opportunities for innovation. I think from that perspective there were some fantastic entries.”

Joanne Cockerill, a packaging specialist at the Manildra Group, said a lot of effort had been put into some of the entries. “I was really impressed with the amount of detail that went into it, the certifications and testings that come of them did,” she said. “It was really good having the graphics there, to see what they looked like.”

Cockerill also pointed out that, with regard to packaging, food and beverage manufacturers cannot get their product onto some supermarket shelves if they don’t comply to certain guidelines.

“Aldi has said that packaging of products they sell have to be within the 2020 guidelines of being sustainable and recyclable.”

Ron Mines, general manager of RM Boxology, was also impressed.

“The quality of the nominees was very good,” he said. He also mentioned that as well as innovation, sustainability and safety were a common theme with a lot of the nominations, which he said is becoming more important, especially when it comes to the packaging side of the food and beverage industry.

“When you are talking about packaging for food, the big concern is food safety,” he said. “Having packaging that provides for food safety as well as a measure of sustainability is a pretty difficult thing to achieve. It is a complicated area, and the reason why the winning entry in the packaging category beat out the opposition was because the company came up with substantial sustainability measures in their inventiveness.”

Arenas was not only pleased with the content of the entries, but that new and old players in the market were represented.

“Some of the companies in the entries were fairly new,” he said.

“It was good to see a mix of established companies and also new up and coming companies.

“That is important. I can see that these awards tried to have a balance between established and up and coming companies.”

INGREDIENT INNOVATION FINALISTS

Cape Byron Distillery – Brookie’s Byron slow gin The Australian Superfood Co – native ingredient extracts Sensient – non-dairy protein masking Botanical Innovations – wine powder Fire.works and Smoke – smoked honey H2Coco – H2melon watermelon water South Pacific Jam Company – banana jam Sunshine Sugar and Nutrition Innovation Group – low GI sugar

JUDGES Mirjana Prica, FIAL managing director Nikki Lawson, KFC South Pacific managing director Rod Arenas, FIAL general manager, commercial Ron Mines, Australian Institute of Packaging Joanne Cockerill, Australian Institute of Packaging

www.foodmag.com.au | August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 51

FOOD & BEVERAGE INDUSTRY AWARDS

SPONSORED BY AUSTRALIAN BULK HANDLING EXPO

Simon Bartram, general manager brands for Flavour Makers - Australian Organic Food Co, and BULK2020 show director, Simon Coburn.

PADDOCK TO PLATE Australian Organic Food Co 100% Organic Australian Soups

The range comprises eight ready-to-eat soups in 330g pouch packs.

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The Australian Organic Food Co was launched in 2018. The company’s first range of ready-toeat soups are made from ingredients sourced from Australian organic farms, farmed by Australians and processed by Australians using sustainable methods.

The range comprises eight readyto-eat soups in 330g pouch packs.

Being 100 per cent organic and 100 per cent sourced from Australia, the vegetables in the soups are harvested and processed in season.

This provides plenty of challenges for the planning, procurement, logistics and production teams. The company’s organic growers are located all around the country from the Lockyer Valley in Queensland, to Daysleford in Victoria, and everywhere in between. Once the vegetables are harvested and processed, they are then

delivered to the Braeside production facility where they are held in chilled storage before being processed.

To produce soups with a variety of ingredients – all from Australian organic farmers – takes a lot of work.

The farmers work hard to grow clean, pesticide-free produce. Weeds are pulled out by hand compared to simply spraying crops. This is just one of the many examples of challenges that the growers face and overcome daily, There is the seasonality challenges, and the locations of the farms – and all ingredients need to be planned, stored, processed before they arrive at our Braeside facility.

PADDOCK TO PLATE FINALISTS Kakadu Plum Co – bush foods and bush tea Rich Glen Olive Estate – Yarrawonga gold premium extra virgin olive oil Cider Australia – “100 per cent Australian grown” trust mark

FOOD & BEVERAGE INDUSTRY AWARDS

HEALTH FOODS

Nutra Organics’ naturopath/research and development manager Eliza Mätas (left) and marketing manager Jemma Quinlan.

Nutra Organics Collagen Beauty Bars Nutra Organics is a family-owned health food company, specialising in premium, organic wholefood products. The company doesn’t use artificial colours, flavours, synthetics or ingredients, and all of its products are gluten free.

The Collagen Beauty Bars are available in two flavours, salted cacao maca and vanilla berry. In every bar there is 4g of collagen including one serve of Version bioactive collagen peptides – peptides that target collagen production in skin. When taken daily, Version reduces skin wrinkles, smooths fine lines from within, increases skin hydration, and improves skin elasticity to fight against the signs of ageing that occur when bodies start to produce less collagen from the mid 20s. They also have Vitamin C and zinc, which contribute to healthy hair and nails.

“Collagen Beauty Bars are our hero product and are very Collagen Beauty Bars are manufactured at a HACCP-approved facility.

popular,” said marketing manager Jemma Quinlan. “Our customers genuinely see results from them – anywhere from a few days to a few

weeks. The collagen itself is an unflavoured powder that you mix into virtually anything.

“The main reason we created the bar was that we had feedback from some customers who didn’t know how to take collagen. And with healthy snacks in such high demand, we thought we’d combine our hero product with a really easy way to consume it. The idea then just took off.”

Together with other superfood ingredients including hemp protein, hemp seeds and premium refractance dried berries, the bars are sweetened naturally with rice malt syrup and date paste. They are certified organic, gluten free, dairy free, refined sugar free, and are free of artificial ingredients.

The bars are manufactured locally at a HACCP-approved facility. All the dry ingredients are first mixed together to ensure even distribution. Then the wet ingredients – rice malt syrup and date paste – are mixed through until fully combined. The machine is then able to form the shape of the bars and cut them so they are all exactly 30g, and they go straight into the 100 per cent home compostable wrappers, which are sealed air tight.

The berries and beetroot in the Vanilla Berry Collagen Beauty

Bar are also dried locally, using refractance drying. The berries are blended and turned into a purée.

The purée is then spread across a horizontal window, and the moisture is evaporated using low-temperature, infrared light, leaving behind the berry powders. The process takes five minutes, and it preserves the most nutrients, colour, aroma and flavour.

“We have an inhouse nutritionist and naturopath who develop all of our products,” said Quinlan. “We tested the bars for a few months and came up with the two flavours.”

The bars marry three rising demands – a healthy snack that contains clinically proven ingredients to support skin, hair and nails, in environmentally friendly packaging.

HEALTH FOODS FINALISTS

Blue Dinosaur – peanut butter protein bar Herbs of Life – sauerkraut Kitz Living Foods – tomato and basil crackers Youfoodz – Youfoodz protein bliss balls GoodMix – Blend11

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SUP P ORT I N G S P O NS O R S

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ENERGY SUPPLY

Smart switchboards maximise power availability A smart switchboard not only has a practical use, but can also help reduce instances of unnecessary power shutdowns. Food & Beverage Industry News explains.

T

oday’s modern power distribution systems need to evolve to ensure that organisations can improve energy efficiency, reduce operating costs and improve switchroom safety.

With such a large install base of aging legacy switchgear installed around the country, there is a continual need to review and assess the safety and reliability of this equipment to ensure that a business will not be left without power, or worse, experience a catastrophic failure that can potentially cause injury to employees.

Globally, health and safety regulators who investigate catastrophic electrical incidences have recognised that the pressure to avoid power shutdowns results in the neglect and deterioration of key electrical infrastructure like main switchboards and the critical components contained within them.

Over time, this neglect can cause failures due to switchgear contact corrosion, loose busbar connections and blocked air ventilation, leading to overheating and fire hazards.

Conventional circuit breakers with electronic trip units do not offer any form of protection against overheating in the conductive path.

Within the context of an industrial plant’s electrical infrastructure, the widespread deployment of smart, connected devices allows end users to utilise smarter switchboard architecture to facilitate gathering and analysing critical data and provide real-time visibility and insight into how critical assets are performing.

This integrated solution can provide organisations with faster, more accurate information and enable them to make the right business decisions on optimising utilisation and extending the life time of their power distribution infrastructure.

Smarter switchboard architecture

A good switchboard will ensure continuity of power supply in a processing plant. can help ensure continuity of power supply, minimise the service requirements of critical switchgear assets (such as circuit breakers) and enable real-time “maintenance health” visualisation over a plant’s network.

Imagine there is a tier 4 data centre that provides 99.995 per cent availability per year to its customers. To maintain such a high level of uptime/availability, the data centre’s power and cooling design requires layers of redundancy. Furthermore, it has to have the ability to monitor the integrity of critical infrastructure.

Any unplanned downtime will

bring financial consequences and dissatisfied customers.

The low voltage switchboard contains a Smart Switchboard containing Terasaki TemPower2 air circuit breakers with integrated 3C overheating protection and data communication.

The data centre’s Monitoring and Control Centre uses a visualisation health dashboard to monitor and report on mission critical intelligent devices.

Due to a “maintenance issue”, the forced cooling system in the switchroom starts to blow dust particles into the low voltage switchboard. Some of these

contaminates eventually make their way inside one of the low-voltage air circuit breakers internal contact system.

Over time, the electrical continuity of the air circuit breaker’s main contacts reduces due to the contamination and an abnormal contact overheating occurs.

Fortunately, the air circuitbreaker’s 3C overheating protection detects the abnormal temperature within the contact set and activates the overheating alarm, which is detected by the health dashboard. Electrical maintenance contractors are notified and they rectified the issue. F

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CONSUMER

Coles has a new mission statement based on sustainability in all parts of its business.

Change of direction for Coles Coles is looking for a change of direction as it looks to tweak the public’s perception of the supermarket giant. Food & Beverage Industry News explains.

A

s one of the three big players in the supermarket space, Coles is always under the microscope – usually via headline-grabbing mainstream news, such as the furore surrounding its and Woolworths getting rid of singleuse plastic bags, or criticism over its Little Shop plastic toys not being environmentally friendly.

It is something that the company is aware of and knows it needs to improve on. James Whittaker’s role as the company’s head of responsible sourcing and quality has many facets – ones that are

increasing, shifting and malleable at the same time. Over the past decade, Coles has put a lot of effort into not only being seen to be doing the right thing, but actually doing it. He cites the company’s policies on cage-free eggs and RSPCAcertified chickens. Then there is its decision to stop using the aforementioned single-use plastic bags, as well as its more recent foray into utilising solar panels on its buildings, and implementing the more environmentally friendly LED lighting in many of its stores.

Addressing a packed room at

56 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

the Australian Food and Grocery Council’s Sustainability Seminar at the Novotel in Sydney’s Olympic Park quadrant, Whittaker laid bare what the company is planning to do over the next few years. Not only in terms of sustainability but how it can change the public’s perception of what its whole corporate philosophy entails.

He first asked a question of the audience. “What does sustainability actually mean?” There were no takers, so he gave his interpretation.

“Sustain means to keep doing something for a period of time,”

he said. “For example, I could run for an hour, maybe two. But I couldn’t do it for 24 hours.”

He then put his definition in context when it came to Coles’ business and how it approaches sustainability.

“We could continue to put petrochemicals [in the form of single-use plastic bags] in landfill,” he said. “We can do that for a period of time, but eventually the raw material is going to dry up and the landfill is going to become full and we won’t be able to do it anymore.”

Whittaker and his team knows

Credit: Shutterstock.com

CONSUMER

‘You’re all about down-down (ad campaign). You’re about cheap prices. You’re a big corporate giant’.

“We thought, ‘We’re doing all this stuff, but we are getting very little recognition for it’. We realised we needed to do things differently. This resulted in Coles working to build a new strategy, which was launched recently at our investor session.”

Part of this strategy included concentrating on driving the health agenda, especially when it comes to Coles’ home brands.

Whittaker said that the company’s mission statement is, “to feed all Australians to help them lead healthier, happy lives”.

As far as sustainability goes, he admits that Coles has made the odd mistake in the past, even when it’s had the best intentions.

“I think back to when we

using less packaging’. Of course, all the consumer saw were bananas wrapped in plastic. You can imagine what they thought of that.

“Now, we have committed to all our Own Brand packaging to being fully recyclable by 2020.

The Redcycle program has been a key enabler for us. On top of that, we’re committed to the Australian Packaging Recycling Scheme. I think consumer confusion over labelling and what to do with that packaging is an issue that needs addressing.”

Whittaker said the company is setting itself a goal of being Australia’s most sustainable supermarket – in every way possible.

It’s an ambitious goal, and one that he knows is going to be hard but also achievable.

“We usually focus on price and Coles is adding solar power to many of its stores.

that the public is becoming more discerning about the environment – part of the umbrella that sustainability falls under. This is why the company needs to start spruiking its ideas on the environment and sustainability more fervently. Although he feels it has been transparent when it comes to corporate responsibility, getting the message out hasn’t worked as well as it could have, said Whittaker.

“Last year, we did a study and talked to about 30,000 customers every week,” he said. “We wanted to see how customers perceived Coles. We think we are doing a great job because we have all these great initiatives, yet when we talked to customers they came back with

launched our Kids with Bananas program,” he said. “When the team developed the product we looked at how we would send the bananas out, so we wrapped them in plastic.

They arrived in big cardboard boxes and we were pleased because we said, ‘We can do away with all of that cardboard, and we can take the smaller bananas and we can put them in the kids’ lunch boxes. And if you look at the lifecycle, we are

other elements, so this is really a change of direction,” he said. “What this means for us is to focus on something that differentiates us from other retailers. It’s going to take a lot of work and there are lots of elements in delivering that.

“But we do have three main pillars in place that are going to help get us there. The first is working towards sustainable communities.

The second is to make sure we

are supporting Australian farmers – so we have an Australian-first policy. Finally, we need to be a key contributor to the communities in which we operate.”

Another aspect the company is keen to highlight is the safety of the products that are on its shelves.

Whittaker said that both safety and sustainability go hand in hand.

“We decided that safety had to be part of the sustainability drive, too. Because at the end of the day, if products aren’t safe then the sustainability of the business is affected,” he said. “Then there are sustainable environmental practices.

And this is far reaching. This goes right the way through our store network, our fuel business and working with our suppliers.”

And what about carbon emissions? This is something that the company has not taken for granted, and it has sought to identify where most of the emissions are coming from in its business. They have identified the main causes – now it’s a matter of putting in place policies that will address those issues.

“I was looking at some data early this week and found that 97 per cent of the carbon emissions that we produce are coming from our supply chain,” he said. “While we can do some of these changes ourselves, we also have to make sure we are working with the right partners and the right industries.”

And the transparency part of its new strategy?

“My team is committed to transparency. This is an important point. We are building our software solutions to be able to understand where all our products are coming from,” he said. “Take our Graze product, which is grass-fed beef – we have line-of-sight of all the livestock producers, and what that allows us to do is gather a lot of information about best farming practices. For example, our Graze beef producers have planted three million trees since the program began. That kind of information is very powerful.”

Time will be the measure of how successful Coles’ new strategy pans out, but in the meantime Whittaker knows what the endgame needs to be.

“We are hoping that it will change the way we think about business and about how our team members and our customers see us.” F

www.foodmag.com.au | August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 57

SKILLS AND OPPORTUNITIES

Processing and packaging facility offers inclusive working environment When Woolworths looked at processing and packaging some new products, it tried Merriwa as an option. It turned out to be a success for both companies. Here’s why.

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ased in north-east Victoria, Merriwa is a company that specialises in supported employment enterprises. They have hired more than 105 supported employees out of a team of 300. They work across five business divisions – contract packaging, contract processing and packaging, timber beams and flooring and as service staff in the Park Lane Nursery and Garden Centre, as well as child, youth and family services including family support services, assisted living centres and Youth Justice.

Merriwa’s dream is to be part of a future where people of all abilities reach their potential and feel respected, happy and confident.

The company prides itself on creating a supportive and inclusive environment for its teams across each business division. It sees the potential and ability in each of its team members and provides opportunities for personal and professional development, training and upskilling.

Woolworths originally approached Merriwa’s Contract Processing and Packaging (CPP) Division to trial a number of products at its new facility, based on a new concept of bringing the ‘farm gate to the store’.

Merriwa’s CPP facility was established in 2009, with equipment and material purchased to suit the needs of the Woolworths’ products and packaging. What started as a trial quickly evolved into a full-time operation. It now processes 15 product lines for Woolworths, including dried apricots (200g and 500g), sultanas (375g and 1kg), desiccated coconut (250g and 500g) and shredded coconut (250g). This range now also includes pitted dates and prunes, cashews, semolina, trail mixes, nibble mixes and nut mixes.

“We value Woolworths’ input into

our operations and processes,” said Mark Currie, general manager of operations at Merriwa, Wangaratta.

“Our relationship has continued to flourish through consistent communication, site visits and regular meetings in both Wangaratta (Merriwa’s CPP location) and Sydney.

“Merriwa’s relationship with Woolworths has allowed us to build a commercially viable business division, which operates in parallel with our dream to provide an environment which encourages people to reach their potential while delivering quality products and services to our customers and clients.”

Since beginning its partnership with Woolworths in 2009, Merriwa has increased its output from four to six million retail packs annually.

58 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

It has also steadily grown the variety of product SKUs it offers.

This progress has enabled it to upgrade its equipment and expand the number of food-grade packing rooms it has to meet the needs of its growing CPP division.

It currently provides employment for a team of 30 people (equivalent full time).

It is now looking to remodel this team to support more employment opportunities for people with disabilities.

“Our partnership with Woolworths is highly valued by the team at Merriwa,” said Currie.

“We feel like a part of the brand and culture, where our team takes pride in packing and processing product for Woolworths. This has

helped us to grow as an organisation through strong relationships built on the sharing of knowledge, concepts and ideas. “We are now part of the production planning process and pride ourselves on operating at the highest of standards to produce high quality products. We operate under an extensive Quality Assurance program, developing comprehensive HACCP procedures, conducting internal Good Manufacturing Practice audits and Food Safety audits and have achieved an ‘AA’ Rating under the British Retail Consortium.

“The Merriwa team has built a culture of continuous improvement, celebrating the wins, and being progressive and inclusive, which is reflected in our values alignment with Woolworths,” said Currie. F

Woolworths works with Merriwa’s CCP facility, which specialises in packaging products due to be sold in the store.

WASTEWATER

Algae can be grown off nutrients in wastewater.

How to make money from your wastewater Wiley’s Lauren Elliss believes companies are not making the most out of their wastewater.

Elliss explains how food and beverage processing companies can use this by-product as an asset.

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e often hear about innovation in the food industry as it relates to core business. Whether innovation is thought of as new product development, packaging design, or adoption of concepts like automation, the Internet of Things (IoT) or even blockchain, it is easy to focus on the glamorous, as opposed to the pragmatic aspects of future business.

Wastewater ranks among the most important sustainability challenges facing our agri-food system. As populations increase, product demand grows, as does the need for effective wastewater solutions. In the hope that ground water salination and ocean acidification won’t be our leading legacy, innovators are working to transform wastewater from a hazard into a profit-generating asset that works with the environment.

Industry is now entering an era where wastewater is seen as an asset of a mature sustainable business. It’s time for wastewater to contribute to the bottom line.

Project delivery company, Wiley, has explored how to stop money from

going down the drain and to make money off wastewater.

An example of next-generation wastewater treatment comes from the Norwegian company BioWater Technology. Its unique biofilm carrier blocks are designed to grow micro-organisms that efficiently absorb pollutants from the water.

This process has proven effective in treating biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), a characteristic of food wastewater, which makes it harmful to the ecosystem.

Key to BioWater’s success is the ability to work with food processors.

With outflows varying in richness, volume and temperature, it is easy to kill or overwhelm bio-wastewater processing organisms. BioWater can keep up with this fluctuating input and delivers excellent water processing outcomes in a costeffective and energy-efficient way.

BioWater’s approach is a good solution for removing pollutants, however, it doesn’t transform wastewater into a revenuegenerating asset.

To produce revenue from

wastewater, algae is the food industry’s secret weapon. Algae has been used in two distinct ways in the management of waste. First, algae can be grown off the nutrients in wastewater, producing high-value bioproducts as the nutrients are extracted, cleaning the water. Second, algae can sequester carbon from the exhaust of coal and gas boilers, directly reducing the emissions of energy generation, while producing the same high-value bioproducts.

The opportunity for the food industry is that food processors bring together both a nutrient-rich wastewater stream and CO2 rich smoke. With these two resources at hand, it is possible to provide everything an algae culture needs, giving a unique edge to the food industry in profitable waste management.

If successful, this concept means food processors may cease to pay for wastewater treatment and will instead profit from their nutrient-rich waste stream by selling valuable bio-products. As a bonus, this will slash their direct CO2 emissions.

This kind of cooperation with biology is indicative of how industrial waste could be processed in future.

The algae-based value generation concept is effective because it works with the organism, providing everything it needs through combining multiple waste streams.

In this way, a small but complete ecosystem can be created, developing untapped value and transforming the food system from – an impost, to a constructive piece of the sustainability puzzle.

These ideas are still at the early stage, but conceptually speaking, it is certainly possible to grow algae and produce bioproducts directly from industrial waste streams. The economics of these solutions may take some time to develop but investment continues to flow into these areas and more solutions will begin to surface. As innovative companies enter the market, one thing is certain – profiting from waste streams will be too compelling for the market to ignore making this approach part of the future of responsible food businesses. F

www.foodmag.com.au | August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 59

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

Of seahorses, eczema and organic food After a decade of working for the Victorian government, Emma Greenhatch moved to Queensland and found herself a challenge she is relishing. Mike Wheeler explains.

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fter growing up on a property in Tasmania’s Tamar Valley and being involved in growing food from a very young age, Emma Greenhatch’s career was always going to involve food. How a nominee for Social Leader of the Year at the 2019 Women in Industry Awards came to be working in the Sunshine Coast after nearly a decade working for the Victorian Government in a range of food industry-related roles, is a compelling story.

“My daughter had severe eczema since she was a baby,” explained Greenhatch. “We had a holiday on the Sunshine Coast four Christmases ago and after a week in Mooloolaba, her skin was completely clear for the first time in her life. Despite having just moved from Gippsland to Central Victoria, the prospect of her not having to battle this condition made it an easy decision and off to the Sunshine Coast we headed.”

And it wasn’t as if there was a job waiting for Greenhatch when she arrived in sub-tropical South East Queensland.

“I was completely open to what I would be doing up here,” she said. “Before the Victorian Government, I had been involved in micro businesses, developing export markets for live seahorses believe it or not – so I have an affinity for small businesses and start-ups.”

After spending the first few months exploring the beautiful beaches and hinterland, Greenhatch was engaged by Food Innovation Australia (FIAL) to write their inaugural Celebrating Australian Food and Agribusiness Innovations book. One of the companies she interviewed was Gourmet Garden for their lightly dried herbs and their head of Innovation – Jacqui Wilson-Smith, who is a founder of the Food and Agribusiness Network (FAN) and the current chairperson – invited

Greenhatch along to a FAN networking event in March 2016.

“I was amazed by the openness in the room that night. There was an energy that’s hard to describe until you attend a FAN event.

Collaboration has become such a buzz word but here it was happening right in front of me and it was real. I was so inspired that I joined the FAN board as a director for six months, before moving into an operational role and being appointed general manager,” said Greenhatch.

Established by the industry for the industry, FAN is a not-forprofit food industry cluster that has been operating for 3.5 years. It was founded on the basis of larger food companies “giving back” by sharing

Emma Greenhatch worked for the Victorian Government before heading north to the Sunshine Coast.

"We are a small business like 85 per cent of our members. It is a rewarding job going on the journey together because we really understand the challenges of running and growing a small business." their knowledge, experience and resources with small businesses.

FAN’s mission is to empower the food industry to grow together, and today, they have 280 members from across the Greater Sunshine Coast including input suppliers, growers, manufacturers, retailers and service providers. Greenhatch said that this is purposeful because if the industry is growing, then the whole value chain is growing. This has a positive ripple effect throughout the wider economy.

On clusters, Greenhatch says that they can address opportunities and develop solutions to problems that individual businesses may not be

60 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

able to solve on their own. They foster a culture of co-opetition, where businesses simultaneously compete and collaborate in non-threatening areas. Europe has a long history of businesses clustering, in Australia it is relatively new. Greenhatch is excited about the prospect of FAN creating a sustainable cluster model that can be used as a benchmark for new clusters starting out.

“For the first two years, we focussed on building a culture of collaboration by bringing members together as much as possible to learn and share. As relationships and trust developed among members, they

started working together and coming up with ideas for FAN programs and services. An example of this is 10 of our members share a national relationship manager who helps them to increase their sales and distribution.”

There have been hundreds of member collaborations – everything from developing new products and utilising each other’s waste, to sharing freight and supporting each other at trade shows.

This time last year FAN was very much in start-up phase, with the majority of FAN’s revenue coming from FAN’s members, sponsors and

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

partners. It was fortunate to receive matched industry funding under FIAL’s Cluster Programme, which has transformed the business. It has gone from a team of two to six and expanded its member services.

One of these was Meet the Makers, FAN’s own mini tradeshow that was held in March this year.

More than 400 people attended this event to sample products from 65 FAN members and hear their stories.

Although FAN is not-for-profit, Greenhatch sees it as an entity similar to an SME. And it’s not just because of the size of the cluster, but also the similar dynamics that both it and small businesses share.

“We are a small business like 85 per cent of our members. It is a rewarding job going on the journey together because we really understand the challenges of running and growing a small business,” she said.

"I believe that clusters like FAN are key to ensuring that we have a healthy, competitive and sustainable food industry into the future. In the words of Helen Keller: “Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much."

FAN has had a strong community of supporters from the outset including local councils, corporates and research organisations.

“We are led by our industry members but those relationships with different levels of government and other industry stakeholders is vital,” said Greenhatch. Not only do they contribute funding that helps FAN to grow, they offer many programs and services that are relevant to our members. And because we work so closely with our members, we can provide valuable insights into the

challenges and opportunities that our food and agribusiness industry is facing and play an important advocacy role.”

Greenhatch says that critical to FAN’s success has been retaining an industry-led focus, consistently engaging with members and being very agile to quickly respond to an opportunity or member need.

“We have a whiteboard wall in our office that’s covered in ideas from our members and we always have members popping in to our office at the Big Pineapple to share their

news and ask for help.”

When asked what she loves most about her role, Greenhatch was quick to respond. “The people. The food industry is so diverse and full of incredible businesses and individuals with stories that most people never get to hear. We do and it’s such a privilege to be in a position to share these. We also have a unique opportunity to influence how the industry grows. We have recently formed a partnership with EPIC Assist to support more people with disabilities to work in the food and agribusiness industry.

“I believe that clusters like FAN are key to ensuring that we have a healthy, competitive and sustainable food industry into the future. In the words of Helen Keller: ‘Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.’” F www.womeninindustry.com.au

A macadamia nut farm in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. www.foodmag.com.au | August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 61

AFGC

Mastering the complexities of supply chain data accuracy and alignment Good communication between trading partners, coupled with attention to data integrity, is the key to a successful product launch through the supply chain. The AFGC explains why.

T

he complexity of managing data integrity and alignment between trading partners often results in inefficiencies for both retailers and suppliers across operational and cost considerations.

This issue is likely to grow in importance as supply chains become more complex through advanced automated distribution centres and new routes to market in an omnichannel environment.

Shoppers, consumers and regulators are demanding ever-more transparent product and value chain information in a digital format, underpinned by data in real-time context, at more granular levels than previously considered.

The information must be correct and consistent at all times, and throughout the many sources of access available to these stakeholders.

Recognising, considering and discussing the challenges faced by trading partners is a first step towards retailers and suppliers raising awareness and levels of collaboration required to bring new products or product changes through the supply chain effectively, and to mitigate risks during this process.

Suppliers and retailers face a variety of challenges to achieve required levels of supply chain data integrity and alignment. Key challenges to suppliers include those driven by lack of certainty around final data points where products are still under final development through the pre-launch period. This could be through human error in interpretation, capturing and applying data. Or it could be through lack of visibility into the current specific data in retailer or other stakeholders’ systems to check if it is indeed correct and aligned with the supplier.

Retailers face further challenges as they rely on suppliers to keep them updated on the status of the

"Shoppers, consumers, and regulators are demanding evermore transparent product and value chain information in a digital format, underpinned by data in real-time context, at more granular levels than previously considered."

A new guide is designed to help with supply chain issues in the food and beverage sector.

data points, and their own internal functions to maintain alignment across a variety of data repositories, which can be amended by various parties. There is an increased risk that interpretation and re-measuring by various distribution centre functions could lead to even further misalignment. This is particularly relevant in an automated environment where measurement of dimensions is critical to operational effectiveness.

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To further complicate tasks associated with supply chain data management, shipper/carton dimensions can be impacted by issues such as crushability of packaging in transit, variability in specifications and dimensions supplied by upstream contractor (including internationally) and the weather and air moisture content. It is therefore necessary to introduce tolerances to avoid bringing processes to a halt every time a slight

variation to a dimension occurs on any given package.

The Australian Food & Grocery Council’s Trading Partner Forum is a combined FMCG supplier and supermarket retailer body focussed on delivering end-to-end supply chain efficiency. It has released the first in a series of modular guidance documents to support improved accuracy and alignment for supply chain product master data in the industry.

The Supply Chain Master Data Integrity and Alignment Guide describes the complexities of managing foundational data points such as shipper and pallet dimensions and weights, and coordinating data management between trading partners. It is useful in the lead up to new product launches or product changes.

The guide provides advice and support information to help FMCG suppliers and their supermarket retailer trading partners achieve better levels of data accuracy and alignment using easy-to-understand language and promoting best practice collaboration. F

DAIRY REPORT

Global dairy commodity update Weather and political outcomes will affect milk production prices for the rest of the year.

There are several outside influences that will have an effect on the global dairy trade.

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he global milk balance will remain tight as milk production will slowly expand, while strong trade demand has tightened milk powder stocks. The market won’t necessarily bring firming prices across the board – the implications for each commodity by region differ depending on local balance sheets and demand-side capacity, which includes economic effects. That will change if a hot and dry European summer is followed by a failed New Zealand spring. There is also a need to consider the wider political and trade risks such as the escalation of the USChina trade dispute, increased chances of a no-deal Brexit outcome, and the political and economic challenges for Algeria. These will threaten dairy market stability through 2019.

Skim Milk Powder

Butter

The European Union (EU) prices have been gradually firming with slow growth in output as well as there being lower stocks. There has been sustained premiums for New Zealand SMP over EU and US products. Growth in export trade has been strong at attractive prices, driven by Southeast Asia, Mexico and China.

The EU market is weaker with adequate availability and some weak demand signals. New Zealand prices have been driven higher

by GDT management, weakening with pushback at high prices. There is also patchy growth in global trade, conditional on affordability in developing regions. The US market is firm with improving demand and tighter supply.

Whole Milk Powder There has been a weak finish to the New Zealand season with reduced availability.

Strong growth in Chinese demand has tightened the New Zealand balance sheet. Prices are weaker as buying activities slow with reduced availability from Latam.

Cheese Global cheese trade increased by 4.4 per cent in March, the slowest expansion this year. EU prices have been steady with good domestic demand but slower exports. The higher production in EU is filling new plant capacity.

The US market has lost some ground despite reportedly tighter cheddar supply while there has been improved North Asian demand.

Whey There have been poor commodity whey prices due to tariffs on US products and the culling of Chinese and other Asian countries’ pig herds. The US market remains weak with poor demand prospects, but there have been improving WPC-80 markets as stocks ease.

The complex effects of African Swine Fever (ASF) will continue to unfold well beyond the impact on commodity whey prices. F

By Dustin Boughton, Procurement, Maxum Foods

www.foodmag.com.au August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 63

MARKETWATCH

Deal activity maintains momentum C

orporate activity in the food and beverage industry remained high over the three-month period from April to June 2019 with 14 transactions announced.

Health food retailer Healthy Life has joined GoVita as members of the GoVita retail network. Healthy Life’s 50-plus store network will be co-branded GoVita & Healthy Life and will operate alongside GoVita’s 135 health store network.

Lion Dairy & Drinks announced the sale of their specialty cheese business to Saputo for $280 million. The sale included several speciality cheese brands such as King Island Dairy and South Cape, cheese manufacturing assets and two Lion-owned farms on King Island. The cheese business employs approximately 400 people.

Froneri, the owner of Peter’s ice cream bought New Zealand’s Tip Top ice cream for $380m. Froneri is the third largest ice cream manufacturer in the world, selling ice cream in 20 countries.

New World Foods, a meat jerky company that was acquired by Tony Quinn in 2018, has acquired Meatsnacks Group for an undisclosed amount. Meatsnacks Group is a leading UK-based jerky and biltong manufacturer and brand owner.

TasFoods acquired Betta Milk’s milk processing assets (and brands) for $11.5m.

The acquisition will strengthen TasFoods’ existing dairy business.

US-based Connell Bros. acquired Ingredient Resources, a supplier of value-added functional ingredients in Australia and New Zealand. Comet Line Consulting advised Ingredient Resources on the sale of the business to Connell Bros.

Sugar-free beverage company Nexba raised $6m from investors through a capital raise.

Coca-Cola Amatil sold fruit and vegetable processor SPC Ardmona for $40 million to Shepparton Partners Collective. Shepparton Partners, a joint venture between Perma Funds Management and The Eights, has offered ongoing employment to all permanent employees of SPC. The agreement includes an earnout that could deliver up to $15m for Coca-Cola Amatil if certain growth targets are achieved.

ASX listed Keytone Dairy acquired Omniblend for a consideration of $22.6m settled through a combination of cash and the issue of Keytone shares.

Ben van der Westhuizen and David Baveystock are directors of Comet Line Consulting, an advisory business that specialises in acquisitions and divestments within the Australian food and beverage industry. For more information, visit www.cometlineconsulting.com.au.

Date

Target Name

Acquirer

Sector

3 April 19

Healthy Life (rebrand)

Go Vita

Health food retail

9 April 19

Meatsnacks Group

New World Foods

Meat-based snacking

26 April 19

Lion Cheese business

Saputo

Dairy

13 May 19

Betta Milk

TasFoods

Dairy

13 May 19

Tip Top ice cream

Froneri

Ice cream

14 May 19

Ozone Organics

Aaron’s Organics

Distribution

15 May 19

Ingredient Resources

Connell Brothers

Ingredients

15 May 19

Nexba (series A capital raise)

Several investors

Beverages

15 May 19

Chefgood (capital raise)

Family office investor

Meal delivery

31 May 19

Marlin Fine Foods

Satisfine Foods

Foodservice wholesaler

4 June 19

SPC Ardmona

Shepparton Partners

Processed fruit and vegetables

8 June 19

Marley Spoon

Woolworths

Meal kits

13 June 19

180 Nutrition

Bega Cheese

Healthy and Natural

17 June 19

Omniblend

Keytone Dairy

Dairy

Commodity Outlook WHEAT – World wheat prices to recover slightly from low levels due to lower tradeable supplies.

COARSE GRAINS – World barley prices to rise due to low stocks and strong demand for feed and industrial-use coarse grains.

BEEF AND VEAL – Australian cattle prices to fall due to higher production and strong competition in export markets.

SHEEP MEAT – Strong competition from processors and restockers to drive lamb prices higher.

OILSEEDS – World canola prices to fall due to abundant oilseed supplies.

DAIRY – Milk prices to rise due to a falling Australian dollar and increased competition for milk.

SUGAR – World sugar prices to fall due to world sugar supply growing faster than demand.

Source: Department of Agriculture and Water Resources (ABARES), Agricultural commodities March quarter, 2018.

64 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

NEW PRODUCTS

Waterproof railway fanless box PC with M12 connection and WWAN redundancy Backplane Systems Technology has announced the release of iBASE's new MPT-3000RP, an EN50155/EN45545-certified outdoor waterproof fanless box PC, ideal for railway applications and featuring an Intel Atom processor, IP67 rating, M12 connection, and wireless wide area network (WWAN redundancy).

The MPT-3000RP fanless embedded PC has been developed especially for railway applications. This EN50155-TX-certified and IP67-rated system, which recently received an award in excellence, offers the water and shock resistance necessary for outdoor applications and fully meets Intelligent Internet of Vehicle (IIoV) requirements.

The system is equipped with a rugged and reliable design, featuring

robust M12 connectors for fail-safe connection and fault-free data transmission for rolling stock operating environment. It boasts a -40 to 70°C operating temperature and a variety of power input options to meet railway standards and handle deployment harsh conditions, as well as industrial applications.

The MPT-3000RP is powered by an Intel Atom E3845 processor with 4GB DDR3L-1333 on-board memory. Built-in M12 connectors accommodate 2x GbE, 1x VGA, 3x COM, 1x power, 1x GPIO, and 1x CAN Bus. The computer platform operates reliably with full vehicle battery power control, and employs interchangeable modular power supplies supporting 9V-36V DC/72V/110V. The unit is built with a GPS module and high computing performance to provide the most accurate position coordinates and data about vehicle surroundings possible while in motion. It is also packed with a rich set of connectivity choices including dual SIM sockets with WWAN redundancy, half-size Mini PCIe, full-size Mini PCIe, and three M.2 sockets for 2230, 3042, and 2280 modular card types Features include • EN50155 certification and IP67 rating • Fanless and ruggedised design • Robust M12 connectors for Dual GbE, USB, and power input • Dual SIM sockets support WWAN redundancy • Rich I/O interface for wireless, SSD, GPS, WWAN • Ignition power control • Wide-range voltage GPIO interface Backplane Systems Technology (02) 9457 6400 www.backplane.com.au

Centrifuge control by optek Installation of optek sensors at the inlet and at the outlet of a centrifuge greatly improves separation performance, reduces losses and improves product consistency. The feed often has high variable solids loading. Separation efficiency can be greatly improved by installing an optek AF16-N or AS16-N prior to the separator. The separator feed rate can then be optimised based on real-time solids concentration measurements. Flow may be adjusted to meet system requirements for optimised performance and prevent overloading or clogging of the separator.

Solids Discharge When measuring the absorption in the solids discharge stream of the separator, an optek sensor equipped with a small optical path length will accurately correlate absorption measurements directly to weight-percent. This enables accurate yield measurement and control of product quality.

AMS Instrumentation & Calibration (03) 9017 8225 www.ams.ic.com.au

Outlet (Discharge) The separator outlet (discharge) is the most common point of installation for process photometers. Monitoring at this point can help to maximise the efficiency of the system. Some systems control discharge based on time parameters set from the previous run, which is only valid with an average constant feed load.

A more efficient approach is to control the discharge based on need, which can be monitored by an optek inline sensor. Using an optek turbidity sensor to control the discharge by need, the number of discharge cycles can be reduced significantly. This increases yield, ensures consistency downstream, reduces mechanical wear, and helps avoid "blinding" of downstream filters.

Typically for cell culture processing, an optek TF16-N scattered light sensor is installed to ensure immediate detection of lowest concentrations. An optek AF16-N absorption sensor is commonly used for higher density fermentation processing.

www.foodmag.com.au | August 2019 | Food&Beverage Industry News 65

NEW PRODUCTS

Nord’s innovative food and beverage range As part of their commitment to the industry and local market, Nord Drivesystems prides itself on delivering individual drive solutions for the industry which offer energy savings, reduced maintenance, minimum downtime and are designed to the stringent standards of the food and beverage sector.

Over the past few years, Nord has let one of the latest additions to its product portfolio speak for itself. The NSD TupH has been tested in some of the harshest and most demanding environments and the results speak for themselves.

Its unique and resistant surface is a cost-effective and reliable alternative to stainless steel and has stood the test of time in manufacturing environments around the country. Its corrosion resistant, cleanable, sealed surface delivers all the benefits without compromising on quality. Its surface is six to seven times harder than the aluminium substrate and up to 1000 times harder than paint.

Martin Broglia, managing director for Nord Drivesystems in Australia said that the response to this product has been remarkable. "While the benefits do speak for themselves, getting customers to change from their current solutions is always tricky.

What we found is that this product really does all the leg work and has been proven time and time again, with very little effort from our side."

"Visitors to the show can come and see the product for themselves.

We are also happy to take them through some our successes to date and to find out more about their requirements," said Broglia.

Another product to be featured on their stand will be the IE4 range

of synchronous motors, built for high efficiencies and low operating costs.

"Again, Nord keeps your TCO in mind when developing our products.

We understand the investment that you have made and want to see it through all the way," he said.

High efficiency levels of the IE4 range are based on permanent magnet technology which Nord has specially designed. Even at low speeds, these units achieve high torques and excellent efficiency.

Nord Drivesystems (03) 9394 0500 www.nord.com/cms/en/home-au.jsp

Wireless fieldbus system EX600-W for robotic applications SMC's Wireless fieldbus system EX600-W scooped up the award for Technical Innovation of the Year in the UK at this year's Motion Control Awards.

The EX600-W is currently being used in the food, beverage and packaging industries.

According to Ming Liu, head of product and pricing group at SMC Corporation ANZ, this decentralised solution is EtherNet/IP and PROFINET compatible, can withstand electric noise and is suitable for harsh, industrial environments. 'This wireless fieldbus system can manage both digital and analogue signals, as well as pneumatic products, making it a flexible solution for all applications.'

The EX600-W was designed to make robotic applications easier.

'The EX600-W is small and light weight, fits onto the robot head, has minimal wiring, offers remote control and fault finding, among other features,' he said.

In noisy environments and harsh environments, this unit remains

66 Food&Beverage Industry News | August 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au

steadfast. Ming said that, 'The EX600-W uses the 2.4 GHz ISM frequency band and every 5 msec frequency hopping. The noise resistance design makes it even suitable in welding environments.'

As a customer centric organisation, SMC designed this unit with exact this in mind. This wireless unit ensures minimised installation, modifications and maintenance time. 'The risk of disconnection and circuit breakage is also significantly reduced to both performance and productivity,' he said.

SMC Australia (02) 9354 8222 www.smcanz.com

EARLY CONTRACTOR INVOLVEMENT With a specialist builder such as Total Construction you can avoid potential cost blow outs in your project before design and location is determined.

Contact us today to find out how we can help with construction planning for your next Food & Beverage project. |

Call: (02) 9746 9555

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Visit: totalconstruction.com.au