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A successful collaboration between GEA and long-term customer Chr. Hansen was completed with the inauguration of the world’s largest fermentation plant for bacterial cultures at the customer’s site in Copenhagen, Denmark on November 23, 2017.
Chr. Hansen is a global bioscience company that develops natural solutions for the food, nutritional, pharmaceutical and agricultural industries.
The production site now comprises with the latest highly complex AIR17-fermentation project four production lines; two lines with 45 cubic metre fermentors each and two lines with 100 cubic metre fermentors each, which makes it the largest production site of its kind worldwide.
According to Jesper Finnemann, GEA Senior Project Manager, being able to successfully execute a project of this scale and complexity is the result of carefully listening to the customer’s needs at all times and careful planning. The high expertise of the GEA team responsible for executing the project and the successful result managed to exceed Chr. Hansen’s expectations.
According to Torsten Steenholt, EVP Global Operations at Chr. Hansen, two criteria for success were crucial to Chr. Hansen when choosing their supplier and partner on this project; the ability to meet a very high level of hygienic requirements and providing an effective and high level of automation during production.
“The hygienic requirements when producing bacterial cultures are much stricter than for other types of food production. We needed a supplier that could provide this in their application solution for cultures, along with the automated functions, and GEA accomplished this task to our great satisfaction. Furthermore, the high level of hygiene and the automated production process have enabled significant cost savings,” he says.
The fact that the installation took place while existing production lines were running added to the complexity of the project.
