Freeze-dried coffee production plant for Tata Coffee

Gea has com­plet­ed a new freeze-dried instant cof­fee plant on a green field site in Viet­nam for Tata Cof­fee Viet­nam Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed, a 100% sub­sidiary of Tata Cof­fee Lim­it­ed, India.

Accord­ing to the timetable for the con­tract project which was signed two years ago, the new plant was inau­gu­rat­ed on March 6, 2019 – just 19 months after the ground­break­ing ceremony.

Viet­nam is the world’s sec­ond largest pro­duc­er of green cof­fee, after Brazil. The plant in the Binh Duong Province pro­duces 5,000 met­ric tons/annum of freeze-dried cof­fee. Gea sup­plied the entire pro­duc­tion line from roast bean treat­ment right through to the pack­ing of the freeze-dried pow­der using its proven tech­nol­o­gy. This includ­ed: Carine extrac­tion which oper­ates at opti­mal con­di­tions, using pre­cise­ly devel­oped extrac­tion times to obtain the high­est pos­si­ble yields while respect­ing the final prod­uct qual­i­ty; aro­ma recov­ery; mechan­i­cal vapor recov­ery (MVR) evap­o­ra­tion; and a Con­rad 600 XL Eco freeze dry­er for high­ly effi­cient con­tin­u­ous oper­a­tion with min­i­mal ener­gy con­sump­tion. The com­pa­ny also sup­plied a com­plete pilot plant, pro­vid­ing Tata with facil­i­ties where it can devel­op exclu­sive blends for customers.

Pre­vi­ous work car­ried out for Tata Cof­fee includes a cof­fee extrac­tion and evap­o­ra­tion plant that Gea built for the com­pa­ny in India in 2013. Gea also has exten­sive expe­ri­ence of build­ing cof­fee plants in Viet­nam and this local expe­ri­ence was extreme­ly use­ful as Gea project man­agers were able to pro­vide Tata with sup­port in sourc­ing expe­ri­enced and reli­able local part­ners for man­ag­ing, util­i­ties, instal­la­tion and work­shop facil­i­ties. The fac­to­ry required near­ly one mil­lion man hours to build and main­tain an exem­plary safe­ty record. The site has been cer­ti­fied for LEED (Lead­er­ship in Ener­gy and Envi­ron­men­tal Design) and is expect­ing BRC (British Retail Con­sor­tium) cer­ti­fi­ca­tion shortly.

Kim Knud­sen, Head of Sales, Cof­fee and Freeze Dry­ing at Gea said that the Tata fac­to­ry in Viet­nam had been a mod­el project for the com­pa­ny. “This type of project is ide­al for us at Gea because our exper­tise and scope of sup­ply allows us to build the entire cof­fee line using our own resources,” he said. “This means we can main­tain con­trol and take respon­si­bil­i­ty for the entire project from start to finish.”