Sycamore delivers new cheese vat room for Arla Foods UK, Taw Valley
Sycamore Process Engineering was delighted to be in charge of the design, installation and commissioning of a new vat cheese room at the Arla Taw Valley Creamery in Devon. The design included a hygienic manifold system to maintain high product consistency, flexibility and quality, a process which will bring significant benefits to one of the biggest cheese manufacturers in the UK.
Arla, which produces more than 100 million blocks of cheese a year, gave the contract in June 2018 and since then, Sycamore has been busy working on the complete design and installation of the new cheese vat room.
The project includes pasteurised milk routing manifolds, hot water set, cheese maker access platform, an automatic system for product fill, empty and CIP. This complete design enables pitching from either direction (overlapping pitching) to a twin curd pump that gently handles the curd for maximum yields. It’ll allow the factory to run for longer periods of production and reduce CIP downtime and supports in delivering a uniformed and consistent curd which is crucial to the cheese making process.
James Ley, lead Project Engineer for the cheese room comments: “Customers come to us because we can offer complete flexibility and bespoke designs to truly deliver a solution they need, designed to fit the space our customers have available. This project is a great example of that as we were able to design the layout of the new room from start to finish and the result has meant increased productivity for Arla and a fantastic working environment for their team.”
The Design
The in-house design team at Sycamore team were able to freely model the cheese vat room in 3D and give Arla a virtual tour of the system, before any manufacturing happened. It allows us to be much more sustainable in our manufacturing process, as changes can all be made at the design stage, saving costs on materials and ensuring we get it “Right first time”.
A dedicated team consisting of project engineers, welding specialists, design engineers and automation engineers worked tirelessly on the project to ensure the mechanical and electrical installation was completed to highest standards, which then in turn met and exceeded our customer’s expectations.
Frank Sayer, Design Engineer at Sycamore comments: “It was a pleasure to work on the new vat room for Arla. It was one of the first cheese vat rooms we had modelled in full, so we used 3D technology to give the Arla team a full virtual tour of the room before any production began. This meant we were able to fine tune our plans to their exact specification and deliver a successful installation on time and to budget”.
Sycamore continues to deliver Engineering Peace of Mind.
