Ready meals manufacturers stamp out the stink

Ready meals firms have taken a stand against cooking odours by installing a novel air purification system, which is cost effective and promises low carbon emissions.

Fenland Foods, which is part of Northern Foods; Bakkavör business Katsouris; and Saladworks, a subsidiary of Samworth Brothers, have installed the Jimco UV-C ozone system to help eliminate food odours from their factories.

“Northern Foods has experienced odour issues with its neighbours in the past, but this system has significantly improved the situation and a second system is now being installed,” said Nigel Cove, md of the system’s UK distributor Elgin Bay.

“The system, which can reduce up to 95% of the odours in cooking exhausts, has been widely used for 15 years in Scandinavia, but has only recently been introduced to the UK,” explained Cove.

Katsouris’s Abbeydale road plant, which has received complaints about its smell from local residents, has seen significant results with a recently installed Jimco system. Katsouris claimed it was taking its community responsibilities extremely seriously and planned to extend the system in order to further reduce the plant’s odour emissions. It was also looking at the potential of a system for its Cumberland Avenue site.

“Most odour control equipment isn’t particularly effective,” said Cove. “Fume incineration is massively expensive. You could need 1,000kW of energy to burn the exhaust fumes and this means creating a massive carbon footprint.”

He claimed the Jimco system used special ultraviolet lamps, which mimic nature, by generating ozone. “It has no measurable carbon footprint, making it the cleanest, greenest system on the market, and we offer a measurable performance guarantee, which no one else seems to be prepared to do,” he added.