Milk Powder Plants

Manufacturing milk powder products involves a major investment in equipment, ingredients, and resources. GEA offers intelligent, robust components, equipment and end-to-end solutions that help to keep your processes profitable and competitive. Milk powder plants from GEA are in operation at dairy companies all over the world. We understand your need to stay flexible, meet customer demand, and innovate to deliver new, market-winning milk powders. GEA will work with you to tailor the optimum solutions for your products, capacity and throughput. 

Microbiological safety must be ensured at every stage of the milk powder process. Our portfolio of separators and ceramic microfiltration systems physically remove heat-resistant bacteria and spores from milk and whey, with minimal impact on taste, nutritional content, or other final product properties. 

GEA technologies are designed to carry out safe, hygienic processing, every batch. All of our equipment is manufactured to meet the most stringent requirements for hygiene, and to make cleaning fast and effective. Many of our technologies can be configured with automated clean-in-place (CIP) systems that carry out thorough cleaning, with less use of water and chemicals. Less down time for cleaning means more time in production.

Evaporation is a key process in milk powder manufacture that removes the majority of excess water from the liquid mix prior to spray drying. We have developed a portfolio of efficient and versatile mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) and thermal vapor recompression (TVR) falling film evaporators for this process. Robust direct and indirect heating technologies reduce energy consumption, and are gentle on the product to avoid denaturing milk proteins and other nutritional components. 

Where possible our systems can be configured to recycle excess heat and water for reuse elsewhere in the process. Highly efficient CIP cycles reduce stoppage time to ease bottlenecks, while fast evaporator start-up and shut-down means there are fewer delays, so your key equipment isn’t kept idle.

Physical properties of the final milk powder product are defined at the spray drying stage. This critical process impacts on particle size and agglomeration, powder density, solubility and stability. We have developed spray drying systems that are designed to produce consistent, precisely defined powders, every batch. Many of our milk powder customers rely on GEA spray drying equipment, including our MSD^® chamber, DDD^® air disperser, and VIBRO-FLUIDIZER^® external fluid bed. 

Talk to our experts about how we can configure the ideal spray drying solution for your process. We have worked with the industry to develop auxiliary systems that add even more value to your process. The optional SANICIP^® bag filter technology can help to minimize product loss by recovering powder fines from the cyclones and returning them to the drying chamber. Our DRYCONTROL^® technology precisely controls residual moisture in the final powder, and the ground-breaking POWDEREYE^® instrument measures powder moisture, detects scorched particles, and can measure bulk density as well as tapped density. The smart POWDEREYE^® technology automatically alerts the operator if process parameters are heading out of specification, so that they can be fine-tuned, and costly out-of-specification production avoided. And to minimize stoppage time between batches we can configure spray drying systems with dual feed lines, so you can continue to operate when one feed system is being cleaned.