GEA solutions in the potato industry

High product quality and sustainable technologies for the potato process

GEA’s experience in the food industry offers customers optimal performance coupled with energy-efficient freezing, cooling, and packaging systems. Considering the significant growth predicted for the French fry sector, food manufacturers are well placed to meet the increasing demand for these products with innovative processing and freezing solutions that really make a difference in the battle to prevent climate change.

Reduce power consumption and improve energy efficiency

Today, any type of food can be frozen but the quality of the end product is what really counts. The key criteria are the ability to continuously monitor the product’s frozen state at the freezer exit and automatically adjust freezer conditions when needed. This ensures that the products leave the freezer at the expected frozen quality.

CALLIFREEZE®is a unique freezer control system thatmonitors the condition of products at the freezer exit, and automatically calibrates the freezer parameters to ensure all products are frozen according to optimum requirements.The GEA Callifreeze® control system leads to a minimum 9% energy saving on refrigeration system consumption. 

Refrigeration. Enabling reductions in CO2 emissions

GEA experts can integrate sustainable cooling & heating solutions with the whole potato process in the best possible way, resulting in lower energy consumption, minimized operating costs, and reduced carbon footprint.

GEA also helps customers to decarbonize their heating by using electricity-driven heat pumps. The carbon-friendly heat pump solution can channel the heat recovered from the freezer to elsewhere in the production process, for example to heat up water, for cleaning, or even for use in the process of drying the French fries before they are fried.

“The installation of GEA heat pump technology for drying French fries at a site for one of the world’s largest French fries producers enabled 70% energy savings in the drying process. Designed to condense 1,500 kg of water per hour, the technology reduced natural gas consumption at the facility by 800,000 Nm3 per year, and allowed a return on investment within just four years.” comments John van Rooijen, Technical Manager, GEA Heating & Refrigeration Technologies. 

Rad more about heat pumps and sustainable food production.

RedGenium heat pump with V(X)HP compressor

GEA experts can integrate sustainable cooling & heating solutions with the whole potato process in the best possible way, resulting in lower energy consumption, minimized operating costs, and reduced carbon footprint.

Packaging. GEA SmartPacker CX and SX 400

With the packaging of frozen foods, like French fries, challenges emerge every day. To pack French fries, quickly and safely, to avoid the leaking of packs as well as to prevent unnecessary food and material wastage; the GEA Smart Sealing System provides the opportunity to tackle these challenges.

Each Smart Packer CX and SX 400 with Smart Sealing System empowers you to easily produce quality pillow and gusset bags. The system is smartly engineered to handle irregular products such as French fries without damage or production interruption. The Smart Sealing system can continuously seal up to one million bags reliably without changing the sealing strips thanks to the use of special metal tapes in the sealing area.  These metal tapes eliminate the need to replace the previously used Teflon tape on the heated sealing jaws after just a few hours.

The Smart Sealing System provides more reliable sealing of the bag with the incorporated product in seal detection system. Eliminating the possibility of open packages. The result: lower costs and improved productivity. GEA has additionally increased the pressure applied by the Smart Sealing System to each seal and has reduced the cooling time of the produced seal for each cycle. The result is a faster running speed and a 20% increase in machine output, sealing consistency, and increased packaging quality.