One of the most popular stands at this year's Drinktec fair in Munich last September featured a breakthrough new cleaning and disinfection technology from Irish company Trustwater.
During the four days of the show, the world’s largest drinks industry fair, the stand attracted more than 500 visitors leading to more than 200 separate customer enquiries in the weeks following the event.
This sort of experience is rapidly becoming the norm for this young Irish company which now has its technology installed in 36 different countries around the world and won an Irish Times Innovation Award earlier this year.
"Drinktec went exceptionally well for us," says Trustwater chief executive Edmond O'Reilly. "We now have a very strong pipeline of new customer enquiries and, as a direct result of the fair, we have people on the ground in Japan and China discussing new business opportunities." This is remarkable progress for a firm which was still in the process of proving its technology not much more than a year ago. "We now have installations in the US, Canada, Mexico, a number of countries in Latin America, Australia and in China and are growing rapidly."
The secret of Trustwater’s success lies in the clear financial and other benefits the technology offers users.
One of the main challenges facing the modern beverage industry is the changeover from one drink to another on the same production or bottling line. And the difficulty is exacerbated when the drinks involved are highly flavoured or pungent drinks. Even the slightest residue from one drink could render the next unusable due to unwanted smell or colouring.
Up until now the process required to remove the tastes and smells from the lines involved three or four steps and took anywhere up to five-and-a-half hours to complete. The Trustwater process reduces the total time required to just 20 minutes, however.
This is achieved through the company’s innovative rapid electro-chemical activation (ECA) changeover protocol. ECA is the generation of activated solutions by passing a dilute saltwater solution through an electrolytic membrane (to produce a highly microbicidal negatively charged catholyte solution with detergent properties known as Aversol which consists predominantly of sodium hydroxide in an excited state.
“Our process eliminates the hazardous chemicals associated with traditional cleaning processes,” O’Reilly explains. “This improves health and safety both at the plant level and for consumers of the product. It’s also more effective than traditional chemicals and it needs shorter contact times. This dramatically reduces cleaning times during production changeovers.”
These changeovers typically take place several times a day in a modern beverage plant. "Reducing the changeover time leads directly to increased productivity and lower costs," O'Reilly points out. "Our process also delivers energy and water savings. It works at ambient temperatures so the water doesn't need to be heated. And less rinse water is required because there are no toxic or hazardous chemicals involved in the cleaning process."
Bacterial biofilm
One of the other key features of the US FDA-approved process is its efficacy in removing stubborn bacterial biofilm. In applications ranging from food manufacturing to building water systems, biofilm is the root-cause of many contamination issues. Biofilm has traditionally been very difficult to control and this is one area in particular where Trustwater has been proven to have a significant advantage over traditional chemicals.
O’Reilly explains that bacteria on their own are easy to kill but that they tend not to be that accessible. “When a microbe lands on a surface it covers itself in a substance which it uses to grow and multiply in. This is difficult to penetrate and makes it harder to kill. Our process has been shown to be the most effective known for removing it.”
While the Trustwater technology has already established itself on international markets the company continues to innovate. “We are doing very well and we are continually expanding, moving into new markets and territories,” O’Reilly notes. “It’s a very exciting time for the company. Drinktec marked another important stage in our development. It is a huge event attracting tens of thousands of visitors and it is so big that it’s only held every four years. We launched a new device type there and it attracted a lot of attention.”
The new device releases a larger volume of the detergent solution in relation to the sanitising solution.
“This gives us much greater flexibility in terms of what we can do on a customer site and allows us to optimise the machine size. Certain plants have a greater requirement for cleaning solutions and a lower requirement for sanitising and disinfection than others. The new device gives us the flexibility to increase the amount of detergent without the necessity to increase the overall size of the device.”
Looking to the future O'Reilly says innovation remains at the heart of the company's growth strategy. "We will continue innovating to meet the needs of the beverage industry and our other customers across the globe," he says. "We recently installed our first system in Peru and have just completed an install in Papua New Guinea. During 2013, our healthcare division installed our automated dental waterline hygiene systems in three Saudi Arabian dental schools.
"In 2014, we will see continued market growth in South East Asia, Japan, China and Latin America. South East Asia, China and Latin America are rapidly growing consumer markets where our beverage manufacturing customers can see enormous benefits from our ability to minimise the production down-time associated with product changeover and plant cleaning."
