Kündig sets standards - A milestone in raw material cleaning: The Kündig Food Safety Tower ® also known as KFST. It meets the highest standards of purity and safety for our products.
The Food Safety Tower ® is located at Kündig Nahrungsmittel Deutschland in Ritschenhausen (Thuringia). The KFST sets admirable standards with its physical size and safety in terms of product purity. Even the name does not come from just anywhere – it is actually a tower, a tower that is an astonishing 14 meters high. The so-called system extends over three floors.
But how does the Food Safety Tower actually work? The process starts at the top of the third floor, where the goods to be cleaned enter the tower by elevator. The goods are initially passed through a heavy goods cleaning system, a double light goods cleaning system and the self-cleaning magnet. The individual cleaning steps in the system are also of high priority and include three different laser systems. A fluorescence laser for detecting lignified parts. A large number of state-of-the-art color cameras for optical sorting, which detect up to 16 million colors – color nuances. The downstream X-ray system then detects any hidden defects. These are impossible to find using optical sorting. An example of this could be foreign substances such as glass splinters, metal shavings, aluminum particles and small stones. All three cleaning steps are designed to generate a multi-track rejection process to counteract product loss. Metal residues that remain after the cleaning process are detected and eliminated by the subsequent metal detection.
Once the product has reached the bottom of the tower, the clean product is packaged fully automatically and temporarily stored in so-called big bags until it is further processed into its final form. The tower in Ritschenhausen thus combines the most modern methods of raw material cleaning in a multi-stage, vertical system.
Conclusion: What goes into the tower at the top comes out at the bottom in perfect condition, even if it contains impurities or foreign substances that are difficult to detect at the beginning.
The system was developed because the requirements of the food industry are becoming increasingly complex. Traditional raw material cleaning is increasingly reaching its technological limits. A situation that called for new solutions. The Kündig Group has developed the KFST with over 100 years of experience and accumulated know-how in the food sector. We have literally turned the classic raw material cleaning systems “upside down”. The fully automatic run through all cleaning steps in the KFST achieves the highest possible purity according to the current state of technology. This was previously unheard of in this form. The fully automatic process cycle achieves the highest possible purity. We owe this high level of purity to all the cleaning steps in the KFST. With the current state of technology, it is now possible to develop and implement such processes. Before the Food Safety Tower, this was unimaginable as it was unheard of.
The Food Safety Tower ® from Kündig thus sets new standards for the entire food industry in today’s raw material cleaning.
