Every processor could use a boost these days. How about a way to increase production freezing throughput by as much as 25 percent with only minimal outlay and no additional space requirements?

Praxair Inc., Danbury, Conn., believes its patent-pending ColdFront™ cryoboost technology can deliver on those promises.

Here’s how it works. While mechanical freezing systems operate, their refrigeration coils accumulate frost and become less efficient. Essentially, the refrigeration system fails to maintain its set point temperature. ColdFront cryoboost technology supplements the mechanical refrigeration system demand as required to maintain the desired freezer set-point temperature regardless of the outside seasonal temperature fluctuations.

With their freezers maintaining temperature set point, processors now can eliminate soft or out-of-spec products due to temperature fluctuations,” says Rich Jarrett Praxair business and marketing director. “This is especially critical with IQF par-fried items, which – if packaged at warmer temperatures and then further frozen in the package – can result in unacceptable product clumping.”

Then again, processors don’t have to take Jarrett’s word for it.

Travis Scarrow is with Simmons Prepared Foods, a Siloam Springs, Ark., poultry company whose facilities process than 72 million pounds of product per year. Scarrow manages operations at Simmons’ Van Buren, Ark., plant.
 
“In these times of uncertainty for our industry, we recognized the opportunity to benefit from an increase in productivity without large capital outlay,” he says. “Praxair’s technical representatives and engineers worked with our operations personnel to achieve sustained rate increases of up to 25 percent above what we were seeing with our previous process.”

Jarrett concludes, “Finding the added value while keeping capital costs in line was the challenge that Praxair was able to meet working with Simmons. Integrating our supplemental cryogen injection system into a mechanical system – already running at 100 percent – deliver the production increase Simmons was looking for. And it did so without requiring additional square footage.”