Cooperative Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten produces approximately 25,000 tons of cheese per year. As a specialized cheese producer, the cooperative offers a wide range of cheeses, made with milk supplied by over 250 dedicated dairy farmers. Together, they deliver around 200 million liters of milk to the factory annually.
During cheese production, some level of product loss is inevitable; a reality that Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten fully acknowledges. The production process requires strict hygiene standards, extensive cleaning processes, and complex piping and equipment configurations, all of which contribute to wastewater streams containing residual product.
At Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten, wastewater from the cleaning processes is collected in a buffer tank. From this buffer, the water is discharged into the municipal sewer system, where it is treated at the local wastewater treatment plant (WWTP).
Challenge
While product loss to the sewer can never be entirely avoided, Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten is committed to minimizing these losses as much as possible. However, due to the high level of automation in the factory — with closed tanks and piping systems — directly observing product losses is challenging. Without manually inspecting the wastewater pits, it is often unclear when and where product is being lost.
Until the year 2000, product loss was monitored through flow-proportional sampling and analysis. The data was reviewed on a weekly basis. While this provided valuable trend insights, it did not offer detailed information about the exact cause or the specific moment when product was lost.
With over 55 years of experience in dairy processing, IMD developed a benchmarking tool in collaboration with Dutch dairy producers. This tool allowed Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten to compare its product losses with those of similar production facilities, providing insight into whether Rouveen’s Kaasspecialiteiten losses were within the expected range or higher than normal.
Although this approach offered useful benchmarking information, the key challenge remained: how to pinpoint exactly where and when product losses occur within the process.
In the past, it took us months to identify the cause of increased product loss. Now, we find the root cause within a few hours and prevent further losses from escalating.Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten
Solution
In 2011, Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten took an important step towards gaining better insight and control over product losses. As one of the first dairy companies in the Netherlands, they installed a UV-Vis spectrophotometer from Go Systems. This measurement system, installed in the wastewater pit before the buffer tank, enabled Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten to monitor the Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) concentration 24/7. By combining the real-time COD data with flow measurements, Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten could, for the first time, gain continuous insight into the total COD load.
To ensure this data could be used not only internally but also easily shared with relevant stakeholders, IMD developed the web application Sensight. This platform visualizes the measurement data in clear graphs and reports, making trends and anomalies immediately visible.
Continuous monitoring gave Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten better insight into product losses and helped track down their causes. However, it was not always possible to pinpoint exactly where in the process the losses originated. Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten asked IMD to develop a targeted solution for this challenge.
This request initiated an innovative development process that took nearly ten years. The goal: to create a system capable of visualizing specific product losses in real-time, directly linked to the status of critical process components. The result was Aquamoni Live, a smart combination of software and sensor technology. Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten was the first to implement Aquamoni Live, officially starting in 2021.
At the end of 2021, total product losses at Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten amounted to approximately 1,850 kg COD per day. Thanks to the anaerobic buffer tank, this load was already reduced by 30% before discharge. The remaining 1,300 kg COD per day was treated at the municipal wastewater treatment plant.
With Aquamoni Live, Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten gained real-time insight into product losses from ten critical process components. These components — carefully selected based on IMD’s decades of experience — provided 24/7 visibility into losses of casein, fat, cheese plastic, and whey.
Every day, Rouveen’s Kaasspecialiteiten operators analyzed the data and took immediate action based on the insights. These actions ranged from repairing leaking valves and fine-tuning PLC settings to adding additional sensors or calibrating existing equipment.
Thanks to the close collaboration with IMD’s process engineers, Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten succeeded in reducing total COD discharge by 30% within just six months.
Result
Within six months, Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten significantly reduced product losses. This resulted in savings of approximately 650,000 liters of milk that no longer ended up in the sewer. This reduction led to direct cost savings of over €500,000. Best of all: these savings are recurring.
These initial results were only the beginning of a long-term series of savings. Since 2022, Rouveen Kaasspecialiteiten has been able to further reduce product losses thanks to the insights provided by Aquamoni Live.
IMD achieved these results using just one sensor, strategically placed outside the factory in the wastewater pit. The accompanying software is user-friendly and permanently displayed on a screen in the operator room, enabling operators to take immediate action when necessary.
