Maintenance costs and downtime reduced at Greenvale

Greenvale is one of the UK's largest suppliers of fresh potatoes. At its Floods Ferry Road site Greenvale handles mainly small punnet potatoes, but also imports potatoes and expedites the logistical process that sees pre-packaged product supplied to all the major food outlets.

“We are suppliers to Tesco's, Aldi and Simply Fresh, outputting between 1400 to 2000 tonnes per week for the UK market,” explained Greenvale's Chief Engineer, Howard Burton. “The plant has seen a £2.5M modernisation, plus the installation of a £1M line to control the freight side of our business. We are continually looking to improve any aspect of our productivity and, as an example, replaced a traditional 'sponge roller table' drier on one of our lines with air knives from ACI. As a result we have saved a great deal of money in downtime and maintenance costs.”

“Ten years ago, the noise would have made air knives untenable but with ACI’s EP10 blower (11kW) in an acoustic enclosure we are well within tolerance levels. We will completely replace one of our packaging lines later this year and will specify ACI air knives as standard.