The processed food market is highly competitive, with new tastes coming out constantly and market share hotly contested. When it comes to condiments, in particular, there is little room for error.  If restaurants have an average fail rate of three years or less, launching new products on the food market with success is even more rare.  Still, when a business decides to take a bold step, the results mean serious profit.

Hunt Wesson, a subsidiary of ConAgra, chose to replace their stirred tanks with a static mixer.  Not just in one plant, but in all of their North American plants.  The results were fantastic.  But one plant in particular demonstrates the results best.  The first installation of a Komax static mixer was in the Southern California plant.  Originally, the plant had fifteen 5000 pound stirred tanks used for daily productions.  One 4 inch diameter Komax Ketchup mixing system out produced all fifteen tanks.

Take a moment to visualize the floor space that fifteen 5000 pound stirred tanks would occupy.  Imagine, too, the maintenance and cleaning required for a stir-based system.  What could you do with the kind of savings in space, time and production that Hunt Wesson experienced?  Now multiply that by the number of production plants across North America and you have a serious competitive edge.  The energy saving alone was over 95% with the single enclosed inline static mixing system.

There are other reasons to go forward with a more innovative approach.  Two months after installation at the Southern California plant, Komax added a short flanged tube section with threaded side ports for spice input.  This resulted in over $50,000 savings a year from spice evaporation created by the open stirred tanks.  Spice evaporation isn’t exactly visible.  But it will show back up in inventory and bottom line revenue once the problem is eliminated.

Komax does much more than build a better ketchup.  How can Komax supercharge your processes?