More information
Description
The bio food market in blooming in Poland, and last year we noted a 20% rise in inquiries related to organic beer. We are a craft brewery called Browar Maryensztadt, and our EcoBrewery project aims at launching five organic product lines, and making the production processes more environment-friendly. The project will make us the first craft brewery in Poland to introduce products certified with “Euroleaf” trademark for the strict EU bio farming. Those will be: organic beer, organic nitro cold brew and organic kombucha. In addition we will offer organic filtrate flour with highly nutritious properties, and dried yeast – a very nutritious animal feed additive to be sold to farmers, and yet unavailable in Poland. Formulas and prototypes of these products have been developed in the course of R&D works in our own laboratory, and will be tested further under the project.
The environmental effect of the project includes yearly reduction of CO2 used in the production process by 4,6 tons, yearly waste reduction (mainly post-production filtrate) by 21.540 tons, and yearly reduction of energy consumption by 0,05 GW. These will be achieved due to: reuse of biowaste (spent hops and grain) for heating; complete use of filtrate waste to produce flour; installation of solar panels for energy production; reduced use of gas for water vapour production; use of nitrogen in the production process instead of CO2; and reduced use of pallets and sacks for packing malt, and elimination of packaging foil.
The project will cover adaptation of the existing production hall for the needs of the new manufacturing lines that need to be separated from the non-organic production, purchase of production machines, purchase of photovoltaic panels to be installed on the roof the brewery, development works and certification services.
Summary of project results
During project implementation we faced many challenges which has not been expected during the project preparation process. Most of them were the consequence of COVID-19 pandemia and war in Ukraine. So the first challenge was the disruptions and even breaking the supply chains from China and general Asia region. Factories downtime, lack of sea containers, queues in ports and enormous growth of delivery costs was the first trouble. The effect of this were troubles in European machines producers’ factories who did not have a row material (steel, processors and chips etc.) on time and in reasonable prices. So, they postpone production or decreased numbers of orders accepted, especially they had lockdowns in their own countries and cannot make production continuously. The impact on project was strong cause there were difficult to make orders or the machines ordered were not delivered on time for reasons beyond control of any party of the contract. Secondly the EURPLN exchange rate started to jump up and down up to 20% what caused unexpected risk of price changes between the order date and payment dates plus the date of cost refund, so we never know what the final cost and final co-financing amount will be. Moreover, the prices for all machines moved up very fast cause of issues mentioned above and the inflation which started to be a problem in Poland and in other countries from which machines were imported. And finally, the war outbreak in Ukraine has caused a rapid growth of energy and fuel prices. That prices influenced on every element of our project implementation: costs of machines, costs of work, transportation costs etc.
The project implementation was focused on the investment into fixed assets which let us to achieve the results defined at the start. So, in the first stage we had contracted and completed the warehouse renovation. Secondly, we have started to make the purchasing procedures to order main elements of the production line (brewing system, fermentation and storage system) and some peripheral machines like centrifuge, chiller and steam generator. After the installation of those elements, we have purchased final elements of the line like filling machine, sleeving machine, nitrogen generator and has connected everything into one line. We also installed the solar panels on the roofs of 2 warehouses and has bought the machines for processing of waste that can be used as additional factory products. We have implemented also the Organic certification for products. Finaly, we have the production line which gives us possibility to produce the products planed in project using the innovating solutions we introduced.
We have achieved all results planned in the project. We have introduced on the market 5 products: organic beers, organic kombucha, organic nitro cold brew coffee, organic flour and dried yeasts. We had used different innovative processes and solutions like energy and water recovery from processes, re-use of production wate (yeasts, spent grain) and waste composting, solar panels, electric forklifts instead of diesel ones, malt silos which gives us opportunity to resign from malt bags, nitrogen generation and using instead of carbon dioxide in production processes, flap cartoons implementation and biodegradable foil for pallets. As an effect of those solutions, we have achieved the targets planned for improvement of environmental protection. It makes a huge impact on our organisation philosophy of production and planning. Amongst them we need to especially indicate reductions of the carbon dioxide emission, electric energy consumption and amount of waste generated. It had an impact both on environment and the company finances. Moreover we have improved the company turnover and profits.