Marketing Pioneering Project: Producing Milk in Mauritania Krones has designed and built a turnkey dairy for the Mauritanian company Enazaha. Krones set up a turnkey dairy, a Mauritanian importer/exporter, in the capital Nouakchott. The entire process technology required to make milk by recombining powdered milk and milk fat is an essential element of this greenfield project. People in Mauritania like milk. It’s a drink with a long tradition in the country’s nomadic culture, and consumption of milk and dairy products is currently gaining even more in importance. However, the climatic conditions in the desert state hardly permit dairy farming. At present, four dairies in Mauritania produce fresh milk with a shelf-life of just one week, which means it can only be used to meet demand in the capital itself, with its roughly one million inhabitants. That is why the country in the northwest of Africa has so far imported most of its UHT milk and dairy products from Europe, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In order to reduce its dependencies, Enazaha has now started to process and fill UHT milk, evaporated milk and drinking yoghurt. Powdered milk and milk fat are both imported. Milk importer turns into milk producer Enazaha is headquartered in Nouakchott and has been active in the fields of import, export and sales of foods and drinks for more than 30 years now. The company has specialized in importing rice, tea, edible oil, milk and beverages. It operates several branches in Mauritania that supply the whole of the country with a good number of its own food and drink brands. For its export business, Enazaha runs offices abroad, for example in the neighboring countries Senegal and Mali. Under the privately owned company’s new business plan, powdered milk and milk fat are to be bought on the world market, imported and processed in its own dairy to make UHT milk, evaporated milk and drinking yoghurt. The aim is to sell these products on the domestic market and to also export them. The two-stage homogenizer achieves pressures of up to 250 bar and is able to process the products either in the standard way or aseptically. “Building our own dairy, that was a big step for Enazaha, taking the plunge from an importer to a producer,” explains Cheikh Ahmed Mohamed El Moustapha, who has been the manager in charge of the construction project since 2021. Enazaha had already completed a few relatively small food-production projects before, like a biscuit factory or their own rice plantation, but this was an entirely different order of magnitude. “The market will now be watching our project with eagle eyes. If we’re successful – and we’re firmly convinced we will be – similar projects will doubtless follow in our country,” says Cheikh Ahmed Mohamed El Moustapha. Previous attempts made by competitors to produce UHT milk in Mauritania on a smaller scale had failed. Mauritania has a population of just under five million people and except for a strip of savannah along the coast essentially consists of desert, so the country is not in a position to produce a sufficient amount of milk from dairy herds itself. Thus, this project also serves to provide more independence and boost the economy of Mauritania, which is still ranked among the world’s poorest countries. That is why the German federal government supported this project. A greenfield project handled by Krones Middle East Krones Middle East drew up the plan for the greenfield project in meticulous detail andww then translated it into hands-on reality. “Our decision to opt 46 food Marketing & Technology • August 2023
Marketing for Krones came quickly and easily,” explains the project manager. “It was especially important to us to get all the kit from a single source, quite simply because we lacked the experience to handle such a project.” The first items of equipment had arrived on site in June 2022, and the dairy was put in operation just under a year later, in May 2023, following successful acceptance-testing. The official inauguration ceremony took place in the presence of the Mauritanian Prime Minister and the German ambassador. The new dairy in detail • The recombination system is the core of the new dairy. It consists of a powder dissolver for the imported milk powder with an output of five tons per hour and a butter-melting unit for fat standardization. • The milk is then processed at ultrahigh temperature in the VarioAsept M. That is an indirect product-UHT system featuring a shell-and-tube heat exchanger, in which the product flows through the inner tube and is heated up by hot water in the outer tube. The UHT system guarantees the requisite flexibility for working with different temperature/time programs. It also handles protein stabilization. To this end, whey protein is denatured at 92-95°C for 300 seconds. That results in a longer continuous running time of the UHT system, which was engineered to suit this specific aspect. Two aseptic buffer tanks holding 25,000 and 20,000 liters respectively were also installed. • The dairy products are processed in a homogenizer with an electrical power of 90 kilowatt. This two-stage homogenizer achieves pressures of up to 250 bar and is able to process the products either in the standard way or aseptically. • Krones’ subsidiary Evoguard supplied all of the valves and pumps: aseptic, double-seat and disk valves (butterfly valves), and centrifugal pumps. Utilities supplied and installed Needless to say, Krones’ scope of supply for the turnkey dairy also included the utilities, such as steam boilers, refrigeration system, compressor and A shell-and-tube heat exchanger serves to turn a VarioAsept M into an indirect product-UHT system a Hydronomic water treatment system rated at 35 m 3 per hour. The latter processes municipal water that has already been treated. A Scada system handles system control and also collects and records operational data, thus enabling batch tracking. That means the entire process-technology kit can be run fully automatically by only two or three operators. The new dairy already runs in multi-shift operation. Krones designed it so as to ensure it can be expanded to achieve double the output at need. According to estimates, annual demand for milk in Mauritania comes to roughly 200,000 tons. Operating at capacity, the new dairy can produce about 40,000 to 50,000 tons per year, that is around one quarter of the country’s demand. “As soon as we’ve reached this, we will expand the system,” emphasises Cheikh Ahmed Mohamed El Moustapha. “Enazaha has hit the bull’s eye” The project manager is very satisfied overall with how the new greenfield dairy was planned and implemented: “The project proceeded very smoothly. Our employees feel right at home with their new line, which has been up and running for several months now. There haven’t been any problems so far. What’s more, we can always directly contact Krones in an emergency. Mauritania and Enazaha have hit the bull’s eye here.” fmt food Marketing & Technology • August 2023 47
