Meadow Cheese, the leading supplier of cheese-based products for the food industry, has invested in a new vertical scraped surface heat exchanger, enabling the company to expand its range of desserts and processed cheese formulations.
Providing efficient cooling of products through heat exchange surfaces as well as continual scraping of the entire surface to ensure optimum heat transfer of viscous products, the new equipment is vital for ensuring a generous shelf life on formulations that need to be filled at temperatures below 5°C. Many of these formulations experience an increase in viscosity when cooled, meaning they require significant pressure to force them through the production line, which cannot be done using a conventional plate pack cooler.
The scraped surface heat exchanger ensures both accurate product filling temperature rate of cooling as well as flow rate without concern of building high pressure within the production process. And as the heat exchange takes place in a sealed environment the whole process remains aseptic throughout.
The use of a scraped surface heat exchanger in manufacture allows for increased development and production of processed products and desserts, such as béchamel sauce, cheese sauces, cheesecake batter mixes, jellies and chocolate ganache, which all have high viscosity levels when cooled.
