OAO “Kingiseppsky Molochny Kombinat, located in Kingisepp, approximately one hundred kilometres west of Saints Petersburg has chosen GEA Group Technology for its innovative process, filling and packaging line for milk and dairy products in PET bottles.

Saint Petersburg region offers high quality milk and that is why KMK has decided to exploit it using a sleeve full label and realizing a new, fresh and attractive product. The PET bottle makes a difference for KMK products as most of other products available on the market are filled in carton packages.
The range of products consists of ESL (Extended Shelf Life) milk with different fat content (0,5% 2,5% and 3,5%), Kefir (fermented sour milk) in two versions (3,2% and 0,5% fat content) and fruit-flavoured drinkable yogurt. A multifunctional syrup room has been designed to allow future introduction of other dairy products on the market.
From a technical point of view the product preparation area features for the first time in the Russian territory an innovative solution composed of bactofugue and microfiltration, which leads to an high quality product, with 14 days shelf life without the need of a very aggressive treatment. Many different technologies of GEA Group operate in the process area: Separator, bactofugue, microfiltration system (Gea Liquid Processing Scandinavia AS), homogenizer (GEA Niro Soavi), milk and cream pasteurizer (Gea Process Engineering).

The multi-product preparation room complies with high level quality standards and warrants high operations reliability. The filling line can produce 12.000 bph on two bottle sizes: 0,5 lt and 1,0 lt. The integrated system of blower/filler/capper “Synchro” consists of a volumetric electronic filler with magnetic flow meters. This filler is 3A certified for dairy products. The filling machine design is very simple and features permanently installed dummy bottles, complete with automatic insertion/removal mechanism on each filling valve; the C.I.P (cleaning in place) is performed in closed-loop and at high flow rate; the filler sterilization uses overheated water; when in standby position the dummy bottles are kept closed, for improved machine hygiene.
The filler is complete with top covering hood and equipped with pre-filter upstream the blower and absolute filter downstream the blower.
The anthropomorphic palletizer produced by GEA Procomac Packaging handles different pack sizes and is directly connected to the refrigerating cell where finished pallets are stocked.

GEA Procomac has acted as main contractor for the project and Mr Igor Lavrenov, plant manager, underlines that extended shelf life products of KMK permit the empowering of their sales on the Russian market. «We are now establishing contacts with many supermarkets and our products are present in all St Petersburg region and twice per month are distributed to Moscow too». By integrating product preparation, filling and packaging GEA Group has thus supplied a complete, innovative and multifunctional line for dairy products introducing a new PET bottle on the Russian market.