STiR coffee and tea magazine

34 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 2, 2019 (April / May) U.S. Customs Brokers & International Freight Forwarders Specialists in Logistics for the Coffee & Tea Trades SERVICING IMPORTERS AND EXPORTERS SINCE 1931 66 York Street / Jersey City, NJ 07302, USA Tel: +1 201 333 5400 / Fax: +1 201 333 4030 email: mbrauner@braunerintl.com Miami Office Tel: +1 305 477 8097 / email: wbmia@braunerintl.com www.braunerintl.com MPE's Chain-Vey conveying system introduced a decade ago transformed moving coffee and other products in a way that enabled customer innovation. It eliminated the exposure to oxygen – "the enemy of coffee" – and a rapid decrease in the freshness of the coffee. It also ensured the uniformity of particle sizes and eliminated particle declassification. MPE's patented Vortex Superhomogenizer similarly breaks open current limits and thus enables customers to innovate. It is targeted to perfecting the density level for coffee capsules. Its main and industry-leading achievement is in normalization: dou- bling the densification of particles, thus increasing the amount of coffee capable of fitting into a capsule. MPE is the global leader in precision particle reduction equipment. The newest transformation limit-breaker is called "In Situ", announced in March. It enables grinding at the point of pack- aging, which opens many areas of process, service and supply chain innovation. In Situ, of course, means "in place" and for a business "where you want it." It puts the grinding machine on- top of the packing equipment. The limit breaker here is "with- out flattening the packager with a 10,000 lb. grinder or compro- mising the speed and quality of the grinding technology." MPE's c.e.o. points to examples where major product inno- vation was enabled by grinding transformation: Turkish coffee and capsules, for instance. For Turkish coffee, every single bean must be turned into 30,000 particles. With MPE machines pro- ducing a thousand kilograms per hour, that adds up to around 150 billion particles hourly. Obviously, the value multiplier is in the equipment and the expertise embedded in its PLC software and sensors. MPE has the lion's share of the Turkish coffee grinder market. "Because Turkish coffee is put directly into the water, of those billions of particles we need to ensure there is not even one that is oversized, or it will float and result in a poor drinking experience." It took many years for the capsule market to produce high quality single-serve coffee. Again, the grinding innovation en- ables the product innovation. Scott Will, MPE's director of business development, summarizes the challenge that had to be met: "It's the difference between walking on a tightrope versus an open sidewalk. You must be perfect in your execution of grinding. You're dealing with exact brewing times and very small amounts of coffee in a fixed volume at high density. Everything has to line up perfectly," says Will. Temperature increases from the running of the equipment during the day can throw off pro- duction. Misestimation in settings may throw out expensive cof- fee and pods. The market for innovation in grinding equipment, integrat- ed systems and processing expertise seems likely to expand with the variety of the innovators in serving the consumer. For the giants, it is part of capital investment for scale production. Pri- mary growth players would be the many medium to large firms that service restaurants, smaller specialty producers and proces- sors, and suppliers to the international coffee growth markets aiming at millennials. The business imperatives for coffee are: Escape the com- modity trap. Innovate or die. MPE illustrates the power of co- innovation here: Break the limits that constrain your customers and enable them to exploit new value multipliers. coffee density control, time calibration in high-speed packaging and minimizing temperature rise in processing. This is beyond manual adjustments and human calculation. It requires sophis- ticated hardware-software integration in PLCs: programmable logic controller systems. It also demands expertise in coffee as well as machines. Modern Process Equipment is a leader here and has built on its grinding equipment foundations that span 60 years to extend the value multipliers backward in the process sequence to con- veying the coffee to the machines and just this month forward to packaging the particles. These are a form of co-innovation between the customer as almost a think tank of 'What ifs?' 'How abouts?' and, 'Can we find a way to?'

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