Customer: Liquid Egg Industry

Challange: Conventional heating process for pasteurizing liquid egg products was cutting into company profits. Two areas were identified as being major cost contributors: the short product shelf life of liquid egg products and downtime due to necessary cleaning of production equipment. The industry wanted to extend the shelf life of their liquid eggs products while minimizing production downtime.

Solution: Raztek’s Electroheating™ technology was implemented on an industrial scale at Papetti’s high-grade Egg Products in New Jersey. Today, Papetti’s Extended Shelf Life liquid egg products are Electroheated at flow rates over 25,000lb/hour in their New Jersey facility.

Results: With Electroheating™ technology, the shelf life of Papetti’s liquid egg products is much longer than the product they manufactured with their conventional heaters. The end result is a vastly improved product. By extending the shelf life of their liquid egg products, Papetti’s has drastically reduced the number of product returns.

Papetti immediately realized additional savings by reducing the cleaning costs and down time associated with cleaning conventional heat exchange units. Electroheating™ does not cause fouling by coagulated product, so the system can be effectively operated without interruptions for cleaning. In the past, workers would have to stop every six to eight hours to perform necessary clean-up. This has allowed Pappetti's to run extended shifts.

Customer: Tri Valley Growers

Challenge: Tri Valley, as well as the rest of the industry worldwide, was experiencing short shelf life with tomato products packed in lacquered cans. Tri Valley wanted to improve can quality and prevent unsightly detinning under the coating and lacquer flakes resulting from Poor enamel adhesion and underfilm corrosion. This was leading to short shelf life, returns, complaints and claims.

Solution: David Reznik developed rapid underfilm corrosion test procedures that could emulate a year or more of storage in a matter of minutes. Using this test, David Reznik proved that significantly lower tin coating weights and better quality control of the raw tinplate could greatly increase shelf life and reduce under film corrosion. Additionally, the test allowed Tri Valley to choose the optimal enamel to use in their coated tinplate cans. David also developed a method to treat the tinplate surface to provide better lacquer adhesion.

Results: Using the results from these extensive tests, Tri Valley was able to reduce tin coating weights by 80% or more and realize very significant material cost savings on the tinplate for enameled cans. Cost savings were also realized through improved shelf life of canned tomato products. By using these tests, tinplate could be evaluated prior to having product packed in it. New enamel could be evaluated for overall quality in a matter of days, without the need for expensive and time-consuming test packs.

While the common thought was (and perhaps still is) that the quality of the lacquered can depends on the organic coating, David realized and proved that the major factor was the quality of the tinplate substrate. The lack of adhesion correlated with heavy tin coatings and tomato products. The scientific explanation of the mechanism enabled understanding and solutions to other non cans related problems.