This year, GEA’s innovations and product enhancements were presented under the slogan “Inspiring Beverage Solutions”. An increasingly international public at the booth witnessed how both project-specific one-off and standardized GEA solutions can help customers remain viable in the future, regardless of whether they are producing fruit juice, milk, wine or beer. The key customer requirements are quality results and the absolute reliability and safety of manufacturing processes, not to mention optimum productivity, constantly diminishing operating costs and top-notch ecological ratings.
A particular highlight at this year’s trade fair was the market launch of the GEA Ariete Homogenizer 5400. In presenting a system which is not only currently the world’s most powerful high-pressure homogenizer, but which also raises the bar in terms of reliability, product safety and operating costs, GEA has opened a brand-new chapter in the history of high-pressure homogenization. With regard to beer manufacture, the company looked to the future and introduced its novel “Brewery 4.0” concept. Essentially a vision where brewing and fermenting take place in a continuous process, the concept is set to place exacting requirements on tomorrow’s technology and IT infrastructure. The pioneering element here is the merging of beer production with just-in-time production technology and the option of evaluating digital data flexibly. Digitalizing the various process stages will require huge volumes of data to be processed, but this will allow medium and long-term analyses of trends to be carried out with the aim of enhancing plant availability. GEA is also taking sustainability aspects into account, which affect both the efficiency and the energy and space requirements of plant and equipment.
Besides the usual keen interest in GEA’s products and solutions, increasing demand for services was noted. Live demonstrations of GEA PerformancePlus and GEA Remote Eye Wear were focal points of interest, with beverage manufacturers appreciating that concepts like these will help to optimize the life-cycle costs of their plant. With GEA PerformancePlus, experts from GEA analyze online condition monitoring data to derive recommendations for optimizing plant operation. GEA Remote Eye Wear allows experts to provide machinery operators and service technicians with virtual support in real time.
