The cheese maker Alpenhain placed an order for its high-bay warehouse with Voith Paper Air Systems in June of 2008 for a fully automatic, discontinuous fixed storage cell cooling tunnel with traversing carriage for the cooling of goods sold at the cheese counter. For the past six months, the cooling tunnel has been used with great success.
Alpenhain holds the leading market position for baked cheeses. In order to anchor or expand this market leadership, investments were made in many areas, including an optimization of logistics as well as more efficient storage systems for the refrigeration of the products.
Here, Voith Paper Air Systems made an important contribution by producing a fully automatic, discontinuous fixed storage cell cooling tunnel with traversing carriage for the cooling of cheese specialties for refrigerated display cases. The cooling tunnel has a capacity of 50 storage cells. The cool-down times determined for various reference products during the planning phase at the Voith pilot facilities have proven themselves in practice or were even surpassed. Currently, there are approximately 20 different kinds of cheese, with the most diverse of packaging sizes and designs, that are cooled in the cooling tunnel.
Jochen Völker, Head of Technical Project Management at Alpenhain, is fully convinced by the discontinuous system delivered by Voith: "It is exactly the right concept for our particular application." Thanks to the special air guide method, even critical packaged products can be refrigerated in the best way possible. The pallet cooling system from Voith Paper Air Systems has proven itself in practical applications and is making an important contribution to quality assurance at Alpenhain.
