Nissui cuts Béchamel sauce production time by 83% with Steam Infusion
With a turnover of $4.5 billion, Nissui is one of the largest seafood companies in Japan. Nissui has processing units in Europe, US, China and the Middle East in addition to its own production in Tokyo. The company previously purchased 20,000 tonnes (22,046 US tonnes) of Béchamel sauce a year from a third party manufacturer.
Nissui's cooking challenge
Nissui wanted to produce all the white sauce in their Tokyo factory directly, removing reliance on third party producers. The major constraint was the processing capacity of the existing three stage manufacturing process; it took 100 minutes to produce 1000 kg (1.1t) of sauce. On top of this processing time was a further 20 minutes of downtime per batch because of cleaning to remove burn-on contamination.
Nissui installs Steam Infusion cooking
OAL supplied a Steam Infusion system for a 1,200 kg (1.3t) cooking kettle. The solution has allowed Nissui to produce its Béchamel sauce in-house, reducing processing time and costs. The innovative solution means that:
• Enhanced mixing has removed 20% of the flour from the recipe with no effect on taste
• On current volumes, Nissui has saved 300 tonnes of flour and approximately 2.1 million litres of milk per annum
• Burn-on contamination has been eliminated reducing clean down time to single figure minutes
Key results
The Steam Infusion process simplified the entire production to one single stage allowing:
• Reduction of processing time
• Elimination of burn-on contamination
• Reduction in processing stages
• Simplification of the entire production process
• Enhanced mixing capability