Make your own N2 gives make your own food company a competitive advantage

Bevie is a company dedicated to bringing innovation into the commercial, homebrew and make your own food sector. They specialise in kits and equipment which make it simple, easy and fun for anyone to get into making it themselves. 

At their Ellesmere Port site (a food audited site), they have 9 separate packaging ‘cells’ some of which require Nitrogen gas for Modified Atmosphere Packaging purposes.  They were using gas from high pressure cylinders, delivered weekly and offloaded and positioned outside relevant cells by a member of staff.  This method was wrought with issues:

• There are health and safety challenges when manually handling high pressure cylinders.
• Labour is always needed to offload and position the cylinders.
• If a cylinder runs out in the middle of production this is very inconvenient and incurs time delays and labour costs.

A switch to Nitrogen generation on site was a no-brainer!

Bevie took a very strategic approach to this transition by hiring an N2 generator for 3 months to allow them to understand their demand and agree the size of a suitable N2 unit.  This not only led to extremely accurate sizing (avoiding overkill and enabling future proofing), but also ensured that they were completely confident in the Parker N2 generation technology and concept.  

They are now the owners of a centrally located Nitrosource system, fed by a new HPC SM16RM compressor, giving them 22m3/hr of Food Grade gas as required.  This is piped to each of the 9 units via a Parker Transair ‘Food Grade’ aluminium distribution ring main, installed by Maziak around the suite of production cells. 

They also have full visibility of the gas quality via an LCD function with digital O2 analyser.  As an additional precaution, due to the small size of the production cells, they have installed O2 sensors into each of them to ensure employee safety in the unlikely event of a Nitrogen leak. 

Onsite nitrogen generation has provided Bevie with a massive upgrade to their packaging operation.  They have an uninterrupted, safe supply of food grade N2, which is fully monitored for quality.  This can be distributed to all 9 ‘cells’ from one central supply.