Keeping 150,000 tonnes of milk powder moving
As a specialist contract blender for the dairy industry, Jonker & Schut provides dairy producers with outsourced blending, repacking, bulking and logistics services where hygiene, recipe integrity and homogeneous product quality are critical. Serving major dairy suppliers across Europe and beyond, the company operates nine production sites with a total blending capacity of more than 150,000 tonnes per year — making process reliability and food-safe consistency central to its business model.
Two 60,000-litre mixers for uninterrupted high-volume output
To meet growing demand for larger and more complex dairy powder batches, Jonker & Schut needed a new large-scale blending line capable of handling batches of 25,000 kg or more. Hosokawa Micron’s solution was ambitious: install not one, but two parallel 60,000-litre Nauta® mixers, each large enough to process batches from as little as 3,000 litres up to full-scale industrial loads.
What makes this project especially impressive is the operational logic behind the design. Rather than simply adding capacity, Hosokawa engineered a parallel system in which one mixer can be emptied and refilled while the other is still blending. As Jonker & Schut Production Manager Gert Weijland explains: “By operating two mixers in parallel, we can empty and refill the second machine while the first one is still mixing… This minimizes changeover times and enables us to maintain a continuous flow between 6 a.m. and midnight every day.”
Engineering continuity around quality and hygiene
For dairy powders, homogeneous mixing is non-negotiable. As Weijland notes: “For us and our customers, the quality of the end product is very important… we want to be sure that all those components will be mixed uniformly and homogeneously.”
The standout achievement here is that Hosokawa’s solution doubled large-batch capacity while virtually eliminating downtime — a major gain in a sector where cleaning cycles, batch changeovers and hygiene protocols can otherwise become production bottlenecks. Even the factory itself had to be designed around the mixers, each measuring 9.5 metres tall and 6 metres in diameter, underlining the sheer industrial scale of the installation.
