If you had the opportunity to meet with your dairy industry peers and competitors, what would dominate the conversation?
How once familiar pressures have been dwarfed by the exceptional challenges that currently threaten the sector? Or the difficult decision of choosing your favorite from the huge range of convenient dairy-based snacks and milk products you all brought for the occasion?
As you digest climate change, high inflation, supply chain issues, political upheaval, conflict, and regulatory changes - along with your high protein, nutrient-rich choice – the link between these apparently unconnected questions becomes clearer.
What Are Your Strategic Priorities?
A recent trend report based on conversations with dairy executives, identifies the most difficult strategic decision to be - “where to direct their company’s resources and attention.” Growth, resilience and sustainability are defined as the top priorities, while the good news is that the market is viewed as relatively stable. 1
This choice of priorities highlights the broadly-held commitments to expand into new categories, markets, and geographies, the need for resilience in the face of supply chain and cost challenges, and in effectively responding to the growing importance of minimising carbon footprints. 2
A Market Becoming Defined By Innovation
Driven by product innovation, diverse categories have been increasing exponentially. This is set to continue, as the industry looks to get the utmost out of its raw ingredient. Recovering and up-concentrating milk components with high nutritional and energy-giving value - such as separating whey protein - is important in creating these new products, along with the necessary capacity to satisfy consumer demands for functional and healthy food produced in a sustainable way.
Your filtration membrane is fundamental to the production process. It is potentially one of your greatest allies in helping to drive growth, meet the spectrum of consumer trends, and in creating a resilient sustainable business that can remain competitive.
Adding Value Without Compromise
As you seek to innovate and leverage profitability from increasing capacity, this puts intense pressure on your production and the need to save cleaning time. However, any drive for more production from increasing the pressure and postponing the cleaning step, can compromise membrane efficiency and essential hygiene requirements. While the focus on up-concentration requires new membranes at different tolerances.
With the right cleaning protocol you can apply a completely new approach to the cleaning of your membranes to deliver substantial reductions in cleaning time and water usage. This enables you to achieve operational efficiencies by getting maximum production capacity, in addition to enhanced sustainability and improved TCO.
How Your Membrane Could Help You Target Four Key Areas of Improvement
- Food Safety – Ensure your membranes are free from microbiological contamination and incorporate the use of bio-based surfactants.
- Operational Efficiency – Reduce membrane CIP time and increase production output, for a 25-40% reduction in cleaning time; 30-50% savings in utilities, and up to 11% increase in productivity.
- Sustainability – Save 30-50% in water and energy, and enhance chemical compliance with regulations, specifically with P-free application and use of bio-based surfactants.
- Shelf Life Extension - Reduce changeover of membrane elements, avoid the use of oxidizers and large pH changes to keep your innovative products on the shelf for longer.
Any downtime in the production cycle can quickly impact on your schedules and eventually negatively affect your competitiveness. With innovative membrane chemistry you can protect your existing business, deliver competitive advantage to ensure sales growth at maximum profitability, while helping to achieve your top strategic priorities.
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[1] Top priorities for dairy executives in 2023 (Mckinsey & Company, 2022 IDFA Member Survey)
[2] Top priorities for dairy executives in 2023 (Mckinsey & Company, 2022 IDFA Member Survey)
