Clever food allergen filter

• New ultrathin membrane filters out contaninants
• Leads to reduced water use and more effective decontamination 

Manufacturers try to keep their production lines running for as long as possible before changing products or configurations which can lead to costly downtime. But sometimes in today's fast-paced marketplace, changeovers are unavoidable. German fruit-processor ZENTIS GmbH & Co.KG is confronted with frequent product changes.

After each product change, the company has to clean the production plant and containers very carefully to meet very exacting hygiene standards. This used a huge amount of fresh water which could not reused because of residues (nuts, gluten and eggs) that would need to be filtered reliably to avoid allergenic contamination.

ZENTIS GmbH & Co.KG teamed up with the membrane producer, atech innovations GmbH, to develop a new filtering method for the allergic residues. The membrane system consists of the carrier material, which is highly porous ceramic, and a super thin membrane which has very high water permeability.

Key benefits

Using this clever technique, the company is able to reuse the water for preliminary cleaning. So the advantage of the filtered water is not only to save freshwater but also to avoid heating up the water for cleaning the containers.