The Scoop on Maintaining an Ice Cream Manufacturing facility Cool

Working in an ice cream manufacturing facility is a dream for anybody who enjoys the frozen dessert. For management techniques engineer
Patryk Borkowski, a job on the greatest ice cream firm on the earth can be a good way to place his automation experience to make use of.

Borkowski works on the Superior Prototype and Engineering Centre of the multinational client items firm
Unilever. Unilever’s company umbrella covers such ice cream manufacturers as Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers, Good Humor, Magnum, and Partitions.

Borkowski maintains and updates gear on the innovation middle’s pilot plant at Colworth Science Park in Sharnbrook, England. The corporate’s meals scientists and engineers use this small-scale manufacturing facility to experiment with new ice cream formulations and novel manufacturing strategies.

The truth of the job won’t precisely stay as much as an ice cream lover’s dream. For security causes, consuming the product within the plant is prohibited.

“You possibly can’t simply put your mouth beneath the nozzle of an ice cream machine and fill your stomach,” he says.

For an engineer, although, the complicated chemistry and processing required to create ice cream merchandise make for fascinating problem-solving. A lot of Borkowski’s work includes enhancing the environmental influence of ice cream manufacturing by slicing waste and decreasing the quantity of vitality wanted to maintain merchandise frozen.

And he loves engaged on a product that places a smile on the faces of consumers. “Ice cream is a deeply indulgent and comfortable product,” he says. “We love working to ship a superior style and a superior option to expertise ice cream.”

Ice Cream Innovation

Borkowski joined Unilever as a management techniques engineer in 2021. Whereas he’s not allowed to debate lots of the particulars of his analysis, he says one of many tasks he has labored on is a modular manufacturing line that the corporate makes use of to develop new sorts of ice cream. The setup permits items of apparatus comparable to sauce baths, nitrogen baths for rapidly freezing layers, and chocolate deposition techniques to be seamlessly switched out and in in order that meals scientists can experiment and create new merchandise.

Ice cream is an enchanting product to work on for an engineer, Borkowski says, as a result of it’s inherently unstable. “Ice cream doesn’t need to be frozen; it just about desires to be melted on the ground,” he says. “We’re attempting to bend the chemistry to bind all of the components right into a semistable combination that offers you that nice style and feeling on the tongue.”

Making Manufacturing Extra Sustainable

Serving to design new merchandise is only one a part of Borkowski’s job. Unilever is focusing on sustainability throughout the corporate, so slicing waste and enhancing vitality effectivity are key. He just lately helped develop a testing rig to simulate freezer doorways being repeatedly opened and closed in outlets. This helped acquire temperature knowledge that was used to design new freezers that run at increased temperatures to save lots of electrical energy.

In 2022, he was quickly transferred to one in every of Unilever’s ice cream factories in Hellendoorn, Netherlands, to uncover inefficiencies within the manufacturing course of. He constructed a system that collected and collated operational knowledge from all of the manufacturing facility’s machines to establish the causes of stoppages and waste.

“There’s a deep pleasure in realizing the machines that we’ve programmed make one thing that folks purchase and luxuriate in.”

It wasn’t straightforward. Among the machines have been older and now not supported by their producers. Additionally, they ran legacy code written in Dutch—a language Borkowski doesn’t converse.

Borkowski ended up reverse-engineering the machines to determine their working techniques, then reprogrammed them to speak with the brand new data-collection system. Now the data-collection system could be simply tailored to work at any Unilever manufacturing facility.

Discovering a Love for Expertise

As a toddler rising up in Stargard, Poland, Borkowski says there was little to point that he would change into an engineer. At college, he liked writing, drawing, and studying new languages. He imagined himself having a profession within the artistic industries.

However within the late Nineties, his dad and mom bought a second-hand laptop and a modem. He rapidly found on-line communities for expertise fans and commenced studying about programming.

Due to his rising fascination with expertise, at 16, Borkowski opted to attend a technical highschool, pursuing a technical diploma in electronics and studying about elements, soldering, and meeting language. In 2011, he enrolled on the
West Pomeranian College of Expertise in Szczecin, Poland, the place he earned a bachelor’s diploma in automation and robotics.

When he graduated in 2015, there have been few alternatives in Poland to place his expertise to make use of, so he moved to London. There, Borkowski initially labored odd jobs in warehouses and manufacturing amenities. After a short stint as an digital technician assembling ultrasonic scanners, he joined bakery firm
Brioche Pasquier in Milton Keynes, England, as an automation engineer.

This was an thrilling transfer, Borkowski says, as a result of he was lastly doing management engineering, the self-discipline he’d at all times needed to pursue. A part of his duties concerned each day upkeep, however he additionally joined a crew constructing new manufacturing traces from the bottom up, linking collectively equipment comparable to mixers, industrial ovens, coolers, and packaging models. They programmed the machines so all of them labored collectively seamlessly with out human intervention.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, new tasks went on maintain and work slowed down, Borkowski says. There appeared to be little alternative to advance his profession at Brioche Pasquier, so he utilized for the management techniques job at Unilever.

“After I was briefed on the work, they informed me it was all R&D and each challenge was totally different,” he says. “I assumed that gave the impression of a problem.”

The Significance of a Theoretical Basis

Management engineers require a broad palette of expertise in each electronics and programming, Borkowski says. A few of these could be discovered on the job, he says, however a level in topics like automation or robotics gives an necessary theoretical basis.

The largest piece of recommendation he has for fledgling management engineers is to remain calm, which he admits could be tough when a supervisor is pressuring you to rapidly get a line again as much as keep away from manufacturing delays.

“Typically it’s higher to step away and provides your self a couple of minutes to assume earlier than you do something,” he says. Speeding can usually end in errors that trigger extra issues in the long term.

Whereas working in manufacturing can generally be annoying, “There’s a deep pleasure in realizing the machines that we’ve programmed make one thing that folks purchase and luxuriate in,” Borkowski says.