Belt press increases production for apple cider company
Flottweg Separation Technology
Cincinnati, USA -- An apple cider production company in upstate New York tripled its production and cut its manpower in half in less than two years by installing an efficient and easy-to-operate belt press.
Minard Farms Beverage Company Inc. is a fifth generation, family-owned and operated, 320-acre cider mill located in the heart of apple country in the Hudson Valley in Clintondale, New York. Minard Farms presses its cider from a blend of tree-ripened, hand-picked apples and never uses fruit that has fallen on the ground. Each pressing happens on-site at the orchard and is made from a carefully selected blend of apples that ensures a consistently high-quality flavor, sweetness and color. Minard Farms flash-pasteurizes or UV-treats its cider, depending on customer needs.
Minard Farms cider contains less than 1/20th of 1% of potassium sorbate as preservative and has an eight-week code. It is Kosher-certified (Vaad Hakashrus of Crown Heights) and licensed in New York and Connecticut. In addition, it is HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point)-certified and has had an HACCP plan in place 1 year prior to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requirement to ensure safety.
Producing a little less than 1 million gallons per year, the cider is packaged in the facility and used for two primary purposes. One is fresh product that is packaged in gallon, half-gallon and pint-sized packages. The other side of the business is the fermentation side — used for hard cider with some sort of distillation process that is shipped out to the tanker straight from the press.
Minard Farms completed its second full year of using the Flottweg equipment. “We haven’t had any problems,” DeMaio said. “We’ve had a few challenges, but challenges are just the nature of the beast. The Flottweg tech team in Kentucky is easily reachable and is quick to help us fix them. We have made a couple of other improvements, and for those improvements we also used Flottweg equipment. They really helped me think about what else we needed so we could get the right kind of equipment.”
DeMaio said the equipment is greased on a regular basis, but otherwise, it requires little maintenance. The machine also has safety features. “When all is in place, we have virtually nothing to worry about,” he said. “The belt is retractable, and if it gets too far off track for whatever reason, there is a feature that shuts the belt down. With the old belt technology, the belts could trip and wreck themselves, and there was nothing you could do about it except place a man there to watch it. This gives us even more savings just to not have a man sitting there babysitting the belt.”
The electrical and control portions were easy to install, DeMaio said, and the installation was accomplished in house. “The documentation that came with it was over-detailed, which was another nice feature,” DeMaio said.
The apple cider business is seasonal. September through December is the busy season, and the Minard Farms belt press operates on 10-hour shifts every day except Sunday. During the off-season, it runs two to three days a week and occasionally four days a week with eight-hour shifts. With the new Flottweg technology in place, the apple cider company has room for growth. “This press probably has a capability of about 4 million gallons a year, so we are only touching about a fourth of its capacity,” DeMaio said. “We could run a second shift if necessary and still have men who actually wanted to work on that end of the plant. There is no doubt about its durability and ability to handle additional capacity.”
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