biofresh – leading innovators in potato storage technology – has installed a bespoke ethylene management system for Branston Ltd’s new 9,000 tonne store near Lincoln.Branston, the UK’s leading supplier of potatoes, has installed the sophisticated biofresh system to offer a safe and ethical method of effectively suppressing sprouting of potatoes in cold storage.
The use of ethylene (which is found naturally as a plant hormone in fruit) is totally safe for operators and degrades into harmless components under daylight. It is a proven potato sprout inhibitor, and is rapidly becoming a more attractive alternative to the more traditional chemical sprout suppressants. Many organisations throughout the supply chain are adopting this new ethical approach to meet retailer and consumer demands for lower residue potatoes.
Branston’s new storage complex in Lincoln encompasses nine independent chambers with a total storage capacity of 9,000 tonnes. The biofresh system allows each chamber to be managed autonomously and includes a CO2 management system to automatically ventilate the stores to maintain the correct levels of CO2.
David Nelson, Technical Director of Branston, said: “As consumer momentum for food with reduced pesticide residues grows, our customers are challenging us to look at production and storage methods to meet with these demands. As the UK’s leading supplier of potatoes, we’re fully aware of the ethylene systems on the market and decided that the biofresh technology most closely matched the requirements for our new storage complex. We worked with the biofresh technical team very successfully in one of our existing stores, so when it came to installing a system at our largest site, we asked them to develop an ethylene-based management system specifically for it.
“The biofresh system is based on highly efficient sensors which monitor and control the levels of pure ethylene in each of the nine chambers. We also asked the biofresh team to link with an integrated CO2 monitoring and venting system, to keep chambers absolutely safe for our operators.
“The system is easy to operate and maintain and, because it uses pure bottled ethylene, we don’t have to generate our own gas on-site. We order the ethylene in bottles, store them centrally, hook them up to the monitoring system and away we go. This is a brand new store, and we wanted to ensure we had absolutely no risk of contamination from the start. After using biofresh systems in other stores for three seasons, we have full confidence in the technology.”
Richard Barnes, Managing Director of biofresh is delighted with the new Branston installation: “This system is one of the largest and most advanced we have installed in the UK to date. We have met Branston’s requirement to enable the store manager to have total control of ethylene and CO2 levels across nine separate chambers, completely independently of each other. It also results in significant cost-efficiencies for Branston since the atmosphere in each chamber can be controlled to achieve optimum performance for the volume of crop held in store.”
biofresh ‘off the shelf’ systems are available for all sizes of single and twin stores, and bespoke systems can be designed for all other store configurations. The system uses pure ethylene supplied by Air Products, requiring no liquid-to-gas conversion. At the heart of the unique biofresh technology is a state of the art sensor system, developed by a team of scientists at Newcastle University. The system has been proved in field trials and adopted for use around the world.
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