Craftsmanship combined with automation at Klaver Kaas.

With their new cheese factory Klaver Kaas has taken a big step from semi-automated to almost fully automated cheese production. Without losing sight of the craft of making cheese. DERO GROEP supplied an automatic pressing line for this new cheese factory.

Klaver Kaas was founded in 1977 by the Klaver family and the family business makes both regular and specialty cheeses. From the beginning, Klaver Kaas has mastered the entire cheese making process; even the milk is produced in-house at their own dairy farms. And not without success, because Klaver Kaas now processes so much milk that the existing cheese factory in Winkel was actually too small! The Klaver family therefore built a new cheese factory at the Agriport A7 industrial park near Middenmeer, The Netherlands. We were asked to supply the pressing line including the circulation system. 

More automation
In the factory in Winkel, Klaver Kaas produces their cheese specialties semi-automatically, so most operations are still done manually. But for the new cheese factory the Klaver family wanted to automate more. In the new pressing line most operations go fully automatic and only the filling and the changing of the barrels is still done manually. 

The pressing line consists of several conveyors, transfer stations, an open press, a circulation line and two rinsing tunnels. The curd supply comes from a drainage basin, where the curd blocks are placed in the moulds manually. Then the cheese is pressed, unpacked and eventually delivered on the roller conveyor to the brining section via an elevator. 

"A wonderful project with many challenges, where we combined existing solutions with new insights and came to a great result", says one of our colleagues who enjoyed working on this project. We are proud that Klaver Kaas has chosen DERO GROEP for this step towards more automation. Because of the craftsmanship of the Klaver family a traditional product is still produced, but then less labor-intensive. With the automatic pressing line and new cheese factory, Klaver Kaas is ready for the future!

Click here for more information about Klaver Kaas.

// P. Mulder - Synergy Food  //