Unilever trialling moveable foodstuff manufacturing unit | Food Marketplace Information

Unilever’s moveable food stuff manufacturing facility

Unilever has launched an “agile meals manufacturing unit” in the Netherlands the enterprise indicates will offer it with versatile manufacturing strains.

The FMCG giant’s engineers have made a producing unit that operates in a 40ft sea container and which, the enterprise stated, can be moved all more than the environment.

Unilever claimed the device was developed for liquid boullion but the company hopes to use the technology for other foodstuff items, this kind of as ice cream, ketchup and mayonnaise.

The manufacturing facility is being trialled in Wageningen in the Netherlands, the city that is household to Unilever’s worldwide food stuff R&D site.
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Unilever said the unit can be shipped to new places throughout the earth, producing the most of nearby components and permit quicker responses to shifting demand from customers in community markets. Products can be rolled out more quickly, it recommended.

The model can also be applied to produce little volumes for item trials, devoid of the want for mass creation traces. 

The manufacturing unit is remotely operate by a central “platform eco process” that takes advantage of reside output information. Sensors on the line feed data again continuously, so adjustments can be made and issues quickly mounted. 

Unilever plans to lease, rent or sell these generation models to younger entrepreneurs, “opening up the opportunity for new ways of doing work to other people”.

Olivera Trifunovic, Unilever engineering supervisor and task direct, claimed: “This journey manufacturing facility demonstrates a new dynamic model where thousands of nano factories could be operate from a central process, allowing for us to have adaptable generation lines where ever, and any time, desired.”

She advised just-food stuff the unit can be applied for the two retail and foodservice productions. “The journey manufacturing unit has the skill to create both equally forms of merchandise in specified pack formats,” she explained.

Trifunovic extra: “Unilever has around 300 factories across 69 international locations and lots of of these are major facilities that are made to manufacture goods in significant quantities, at significant speed. But from time to time we have to have to make a small quantity (probably a seasonal variant) or take a look at a merchandise just before launching it. It truly is not commercially (or in fact environmentally) feasible to use a mass creation line for this. 

“The intention is in no way to match the output of a large manufacturing facility, but if required we can incrementally raise creation with any number of these units. Ultimately, a community of journey factories offers us better overall flexibility in our provide chain. A dynamic design like this could see hundreds of regional creation strains all across the planet.”