CIP System for Tims Dairy, United Kingdom
The Client
Based in the Chiltern Hills, Tims Dairy manufacture yogurt in batches using fresh pasteurised British milk, natural ingredients and bio-live cultures. Focusing on Best in Class products, the business has a traditional Greek heritage and has been supplying premium quality fresh live yogurt since 1949. This year they are celebrating 70 years as a family business. Passionate about making yogurt, crème fraîche and soured cream, they supply to a wide variety of market sectors including retail outlets such as Waitrose and OCADO, wholesale, foodservice, private label and supplying fresh ingredients to food manufacturers.
The Project
The Suncombe Clean-in-Place system was required to perform the Cleaning In Place and Sanitising In Place operations throughout the dairy. It is used for the intake silos, transfer pipelines, mixing vessels, fillers flexibles and all other CIP’able process equipment. The Suncombe systems were seamlessly integrated with the process plant to allow simple ‘one-button’ CIP cycles to be run.
The Operation
The original Suncombe CIP system was supplied over 20 years ago and has been run for every working day since installed. Using specific methodologies and procedures developed in association with the client, the superior results achieved through the CIP, helped to ensure their products achieved and maintained ‘best-in-class’ improved shelf life and continuous quality. A second Suncombe CIP has been supplied to increase the factory throughput and is being commissioned in 2020.
Typical CIP+Plus
Suncombe Comments
Steve Overton, technical director at Suncombe, commented, “We have been delighted to have been given the opportunity to work with Peter and Chris and their great team at Tims Dairy over the last 20+ years and I am proud to say that I believe the quality of the Suncombe CIP and the assistance provided by our team, has helped Tims achieve the incredible success that they have had.”
Clients Comments
“We’ve been working together with Suncombe on a CIP set, and I’m just in the process of installing it now. (The existing Suncombe CIP that is there is about twenty-three years old, and it’s working twenty-four hours a day).
The new CIP set has got at least twice the capacity, and has a lot of scope for programming, so it’ll allow us to do two different cleans at one time.
Their guidance and advice has been very, very useful, and in all honesty I trust them implicitly. I didn’t even go for another tender knowing how their existing kit has been so robust and reliable. It’s a key piece of equipment that has actually enabled us to produce product without any preservative and give it the best part of over thirty days’ shelf life. It’s an absolutely critical part of the overall process.
We discussed my requirements, and they put my interpretation down on paper. I then went through what was quite a big document, adjusted a couple of little things, and then we went to drawings, and looking at how it would fit into my plant.
They took about nine months to manufacture the skid, then we did factory acceptance testing, and put the plant on water as best as we possibly could. They held onto it for a little while because I was putting an extension up which hadn’t quite been finished.
This piece of equipment has gone in now, and a wall has gone in behind it. After commissioning we’ll take advantage of their training, both at their place and our place.
Suncombe’s major strength is their understanding our business, and I can say they’ve become more friends than just business associates. I feel that if I was in trouble, I could pick up the phone to them and they’d be there and waiting.
They are very, very accommodating. Very knowledgeable. Always there to explain what I wasn’t sure of; clarifying things. Great experience. Great people to work with.”
Peter Timotheou, Operations Director, Tims Dairy Ltd
System HMI Screen
