Ice cream maker chills out
in the dairy industry, has supplied Scottish ice cream maker
Mackie's with new equipment in an effort to streamline production.
Carlisle Process Systems, a process systems provider specialising in the dairy industry, has supplied Scottish ice cream maker Mackie's with new equipment in an effort to streamline production.
Mackie's brief was simple: it needed to improve its chilling and routing system in order to ensure that its ice cream remained at optimum temperature throughout the production cycle. To meet this requirement Carlisle designed and built a new milk chilling and routing system and storage tanks at its Sherborne, England, headquarters, before transporting it to Mackie's production facility in Aberdeenshire where it is now installed and doing its job to cool the milk yield.
Now that the machine is installed it has usurped Mackie's traditional byre and old mill system, so now it has a state of the art chilling system with piping, which includes cleaning in place. Two separate chilling systems have their own storage tanks, allowing one to be cleaned while the other continues.Mackie's, a family business, which employs 70 people turning out over four million litres of ice cream a year, turned to Carlisle Process Systems, because they had provided equipment for many years.
Paul Griffin, business development manager with the Carlisle Dairy, Food and Beverage Group, said: "We have a long-standing relationship with Mackie's.We have supplied a number of tanks to them over the years but this is the first system we have installed.We did all the engineering work at our headquarters and made sure it worked before taking it over the border.The whole process from receiving the order to the equipment being up and running took just 10 weeks".
Before Carlisle Process Systems got to work on Mackie's ice cream dairy, which was constructed in 1993 out of a traditional byre and old mill - seven years after ice cream production first began - they merely had an old tank system, which could cause them problems with the temperature control.
"Today," said Griffin, "Things are much easier for them.They have a state of the art milk chilling system with piping, which includes cleaning-in-place (CIP).Milk from the automatic milking machines is routed to one of two different chilling systems which each have storage tanks.This allows one to be used while the other is being cleaned and the controls allow operatives to gauge exactly how much milk is coming in with the system speeded up and slowed down accordingly.
"What we have installed is more than just a milk chilling system.It provides a solution for handling and processing milk in a proper, unified and controlled way".
The milk chilling system, which takes temperatures down to just four degrees, can cope with up to 15,000 litres of milk a day.The two raw milk storage tanks each have a similar 15,000 litre capacity and an ice cream ageing tank, which was also part of the deal, can cope with 10,000 litres a time.
"The system was put in, worked first time and we are very happy with it," said Rhona Wight, production manager at Mackie's.
