Kündig sets new standards. A milestone in the cleaning of raw produce: the Kündig Food Safety Tower ® (KFST) meets the most stringent demands for product purity and safety.
The brand new Kündig Food Safety Tower ® at Kündig Nahrungsmittel Deutschland in Ritschenhausen, Germany, is just what it sounds like: a tower. With 14 metres, it is more than three stories high. And the KFST not only sets new standards in terms of physical size, the same applies when it comes to product purity and safety. Whatever goes in at the top comes out at the bottom absolutely clean, regardless of whether the original produce contained even the hardest to detect impurities or foreign matter. This new processing unit was developed, among other reasons, to meet the increasingly complex requirements of the food industry in regard to product purity. The classical means of cleaning raw produce are steadily approaching their technological limits, a situation that has called for new solutions. With more than 90 years of experience in the processing of foodstuffs, Kündig Group applied its vast know-how to design the KFST and in so doing literally turned the traditional systems for raw produce cleaning topsy-turvy.
The Tower in Ritschenhausen vertically integrates within a single unit the most modern raw produce cleaning methods. A lift transports the unprocessed raw produce to the third storey, where the KFST starts the cleaning procedure. The produce first undergoes heavy-matter separation, double light-matter elimination and exposure to a self-cleaning magnet. Additional purification steps within the unit involve three different laser systems, one of them a fluorescence spectrometer that identifies lignified residue. The high-tech cameras for optical sorting can recognise up to 16 million different colours – or colour nuances, as it were. The X-ray unit then captures hidden deficiencies that were not discovered during optical sorting, e.g. foreign matter such as glass splinters, metal shavings, aluminium particles and microscopic pebbles. A multi-channelled outfeed array minimises product loss. Any metallic residue is pinpointed and eliminated by the subsequent metal detector. Having then reached the bottom of the Tower, the purified produce is automatically transferred to so-called Big Bags for interim storage until it is further processed into its final form.
With this fully automated passage through the entire range of cleaning steps within the KFST, the highest possible degree of purity is achieved within the bounds of today’s most sophisticated technologies. Results like this have never been seen before. The Kündig Food Safety Tower ® is setting new standards for the entire industry when it comes to the cleaning of raw produce.
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