Continually improving recipes

Eward Hofstede is Chief of Operations at Euroma. He gained his experience in the ingredients industry at DSM and Avebe. For this edition we asked him a few questions about processing. “It’s about finding the perfect balance between long shelf life, healthy, low (energy) costs and most importantly: tasteful.”

In the entire industry we see everything is getting automated and robotised. There is one completely robotised Euroma in Zwolle. A nice indicator is the number of events that are logged every year by the control system. These are about 250 million a year. It is impossible to do that by hand.

An important theme at Euroma is minimizing the use of preservatives. That is quite a task – both for the production and for the packaging. How do we ensure the products without these preservatives are being conserved properly thanks to the packaging? To succeed this task in an energy responsible manner is quite complicated. That is one of the puzzles Euroma is solving at the moment.

Furthermore, in the entire industry there has been a trend since years towards Clean Label and reduction of salt and sugar. Euroma especially focuses on reformulating products so that the sugar and salt content is minimized, yet the taste stays. Euroma’s own process development department continually works on improving recipes. It’s about finding the perfect balance between long shelf life, healthy, low (energy) costs and taste.

It can be difficult, when everything is automatized, to still understand what is going on

Despite digitization, there are quite a few operators still working in the factory. A part of our hundred different raw materials  comes from different parts of the world and still needs to be dosed by hand. Besides this, operators are monitoring the process and checking the quality. In order to do this, they have very detailed working instructions. It can be difficult, when everything is automated, to still understand what exactly is happening in the installations. That is why we deliver overviews of the processes happening in their department as well as in the entire factory. That way, operators stay in the lead in the process. Because in the end, the human factor remains important.

This column is originally published by EVMI

Eward Hofstede
Chief of Operations at Euroma