From family to the world

Nick Aikenhead, managing director, ALPMA GB, welcomed Dairy Industries International to ALPMA’s GB office in Basingstoke and discussed its past, present and future.

ALPMA as a company has been in business in Europe for around 80 years, since the Family Hain decided to build a machine to wrap camembert, in the basement of their family dairy Alpenhain. The cheese portion has continued to be a source for testing of new machinery ever since, with the latest technology set to be showcased at several exhibitions globally this year.

At first glance the new machines and apps may be a long way from a Bavarian cheese maker, but the innovation continues to the benefit of such enterprises, Nick Aikenhead, the managing director of ALPMA GB, detailed in a conversation with Dairy Industries International. As he notes, it is a balance between cheese making traditions and technology, with everything built, being tested in ALPMA’s production factories, the dairy Alpenhain and cutting and packaging facility Frishpack GmbH. up to a year before bringing to market.

ALPMA’s main cheese making technology is for soft, semi-hard cheese and blue cheese in the UK, but with the growth of alternatives in the cheese realm, so too has the company grown. It has built several paneer plants here in the UK, and in India as well. Pasta filata, low moisture mozzarella, halloumi type cheeses – they have all seen ALPMA equipment installed. Plus the artisanal cheeses beloved of all, Aikenhead points out. “The niche markets are growth areas, along with some of the dairy alternatives – tofu and paneer, for example.”

ALPMA is seen as one of the largest supplier of paneer making equipment in the world, which is quite an achievement.

The joining together of ALPMA with Sulbana opened up another market in the area of low  and high moisture mozzarella. “It added a huge string to our bow, and we have been involved in the biggest mozzarella plants in world. There is a plant in the US that is processing 14.4 million litres of milk per day – by contrast, the UK’s largest plants process around 2.5 million litres. The pizza industry gets 90 per cent of all the industrial mozzarella output in the world, and it goes to all the big players, including Kraft, Leprino, Fonterra and Arla,” he observes.

Overall, there are three main divisions at ALPMA, VT (Verpackungstechnik), which is cutting and packaging technology, KT (käsereitech), which is cheese making, and PT (prozesstechnik), which is pumps and whey membranes handling.  The largest market in UK for ALPMA GB is fixed weight cutting for cheeses. “It has taken 27 years,” Aikenhead notes, “to initiate and sustain the 98 per cent market share we now have in England, Ireland and Wales.”

This was driven by the growth in supermarket branded cheeses such as Cathedral City, which moved to have very strict weights to reduce the historical giveaway. “The stars aligned and ALPMA developed the Cut 25, with an intelligent feedback loop for the machine. Customers want low giveaway, as even tiny amounts multiplied by every week and onwards, add up to reduced profits in the packing and cutting lines,” he observes.

For debagging of blocks, deboxing and depalletizing, the scope of supply has increased at ALPMA, while the use of intelligent processing has also developed over the last several years.

For the UK operations, the issue of Brexit has also loomed large. “We had major challenges with importing, but it was looking at all the pieces – the import companies, couriers, freight forwarders, dispatches, import VAT on products and so forth. We have become experts on imports and have since built software solutions for the parts/products we import and export. We had to invest a lot of time and effort in it all. Customs clearance and paperwork issues alone took about two years to resolve.”

Prices have moved up significantly for items such as pallets, but Aikenhead laughs, there are two benefits to the GB’s departure from the EU. “We no longer have to import infected trees and if you get a speeding ticket, it doesn’t go on a GB license.”

The next thing

Cobots are an emerging area for ALPMA, which has seen growth in demand for them since the Covid-19 pandemic of five years ago, when personnel had to be minimised in plants due to spacing restrictions. As more processes get automated in a site, due to lack of personnel available and the drop in pricing for the cobots, the market is expanding, Aikenhead explains. The databases for the machines learning are also improving, which makes the whole process smoother. Online, there is more auto-tuning and adjusting. “The cost of a person versus a cobot means that over a few years, the return on investment is justified. Also the workplace rules around people manually debagging and handling packages over 16 kilograms means that by law, these processes have to be automated,” he says. Companies have also rationalised and reduced the amount of SKUs produced, which also aids automation. Still, the UK is ten to fifteen years behind Europe in this area, but catching up quickly, he notes.

Despite the increased sophistication of machinery, where speeds have increased, and most have upgraded, there is still legacy equipment. However, ALPMA still buys its old machines back, regenerates and rewires them, to give new life to them. “It’s the most sustainable thing you can do, and we sell them to small artisan customers that can’t afford massive, expensive machines, in packing or cut lines, but need the capacity. It’s nice to be able to help them and it’s also good to have a workshop project for the engineers,” he states. For example, ALPMA assisted the purchasers of Hartington Dairy, Long Clawson, to re-sell some of the equipment, it has now been redeployed in New York state, making feta and soft cheeses.

Inspection of ripened cheese, within the bag has been another area where ALPMA has been innovating. Its Eagle Eye inspection system can scan products with the bag off, and tell the difference between white calcium lactate and white mould. Giving quality control when the human eye is not present. It uses light spectroscopy to do the analysis and was developed in conjunction with ALPMA GmbH and the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. A new scan in the bag product, Falcon Eye, is being shown at Interpack. “It’s a very clever bit of technology, and works at a 99 per cent accuracy level, to detect presence of mould inside the ripening bag before removal and opening. Thus avoiding the need to possibly contaminate the high care area with mould spores” Aikenhead says.

Growth areas

ALPMA’s innovation is driven by customers and right now, within our cutting and packaging division there is growth in sliced and grated cheese production. ALPMA has developed new Block Cubers  for grated lines that don’t use wires to cut, but instead use blades, which are less likely to break and contaminate the line. “We use blades that cannot snap and break and are hygienically made. We now offer medium to high capacity, grating cubers, which can consolidate up to three products simultaneously with consistent cube sizes,” he observes.

In packaging for the Swiss and Austrian deli type market, ALPMA offers SANFresh wrapping machines for every different size of cheese, from the pack of cards to a house brick size. The machine is designed for one person operation.

The latest innovation online is ALPMA connect, this IOT platform,  where the customer sees, online, in real time, all their machines listed – all the 3D drawings, where every part is available and accessible, and customers can see the part holding in stock or what the lead time is, live. All the service intervals, maintenance information, and documentation required to set up a sensor, or calibrate compliance for audits, is there. It is licensed free to all customers, with a fully interactive, ticketing system, that is AI based. “A customer can ask, why is my machine acting up? and we have help and AI, 24/7 to support them. It can also live monitor their machine’s performance within parameters. We are informed and can correct malfunctions remotely in some cases,” Aikenhead states.

Overall, the success continues. Recently, the company welcomed Northern Ireland’s Dale Farm to ALPMA Germany HQ in Bavaria, for four days to look at the machines and processes. “We do some of the whey processing in the UK for Saputo, and we have over 250 membrane plants in Europe, and have some of the largest stocks of fresh membranes. We have over 1,300 employees globally, with manufacturing in Finland, two manufacturing sites in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany, ALPMA are represented in 52 countries, and have four subsidiaries,” Aikenhead notes.

The family business still has a local footing, and with over 10 per cent of the workforce trained through our apprentice schools, give constant quality and longevity, he believes. “Such a strong engineering basis is built on the five year apprenticeship,  and employees can advance and retrain through the ALPMA career programmes.  It’s closer to a social enterprise, and ALPMA is highly community invested as a company.”