Everything's Smooth As Butter With State-Of-The-Art Buttermaking Machine

Consumers’ behavior has seen a turnaround in recent years: the trend is to move away from carbohydrates and towards dairy products and foods whose formulas are based on animal milk fat as a flavor carrier. According to OECD estimates, the global demand for dairy products will increase steadily due to population growth. For butter, the “OECD-FAO agricultural outlook 2017–2026” predicts a global increase in consumption from 11.3 million t in 2017 to 12.8 million t in 2023.

Butter, as a “raw material”, is particularly valuable today: between April 2016 and September 2017 alone, the price of one metric ton of butter in global trade rose from 2,500 Euro to 6,800 Euro. For dairies, this requires state-of-theart processes and technologies for the economic and qualitatively best possible production and processing of dairy products. Here, GEA is considered one of the world’s leading suppliers, with over 125 years of expertise in milk processing and butter production.

Weihenstephan modernizes its butter processing plant with GEA technology

Molkerei Weihenstephan also took advantage of this GEA expertise when it modernized its Freisinger production plant with a completely new butter processing plant and a blended spread production facility. GEA’s BUE 6000 Buttermaking Machine—including its upstream and downstream equipment—is at the heart of the butter processing plant, which started operations in 2016.

The scope of supply for the Theo Müller Group butter processing plant included the following tailor-made components:

• Buttermaking Machine BUE 6000

• Specially designed and combined plate heat exchanger as cream warmer and buttermilk cooler

• Cream supply

• Dosing unit for dosing various ingredients

• Continuous butter analysis

• Butter silo including three butter pumps for the respective filler and packing lines

• Double-decker, space-saving implementation of the CIP station with butter oil tanks

• Patented I-Churn system

Blended spread—a lucrative market