PepsiCo Germany: Design towards minimising operating costs

The high service life of the existing water treatment plants as well as rising requirements to product water quality and quantity led PepsiCo Germany to the decision to replace their present water treatment in Nieder-Roden. The installed ion exchange technology was to be replaced by a modern, safe and fully automatic system which meets the internal design, hygiene and quality standards of PepsiCo Germany.

The Customer

PepsiCo offers the world's largest portfolio of billion-dollar food and beverage brands. Founded in 1952 PepsiCo Germany has three locations in Germany and produces beverage and snack brands such as Pepsi, Schwip Schwap, Lipton and Lays.

Client's Needs

The capacity of the existing plant was too low and the respective process engineering did no longer fulfil the company's requirments. For PepsiCo criteria like energy-efficiency and protection of resources have the same significance as pure economic objectives.

In-plant water processing was indispensible, as only this can guarantee that the applied product water has positive effects on the composition and sensorics of the products. PepsiCo's preferred processes were adjusted to the raw water composition.

The new system had to ensure that fluctuations in the composition of the product water would'nt have effects on the product composition as experienced in the previous ion exchanger system for hardness reduction.

Our Solution

The treatment process suggested by Berkefeld is subdivided into raw water pre-treatment, membrane filtration and product water finishing.

Pre-Treatment

• Raw water is taken from the municipal water network of the city Rodgau/Nieder-Roden
• Treatment objective: water for production and cleaning
• Plant designed for a maximum flow rate of 180m^3/h

Membrane filtration

High level of product safety is gauranteed by a multistage membrane plant designed according to the "multiple barriers" principle:

• Multilevel fine filtration
• Interconnected conditioning step
• Subsequent multi-step membrane plant with increasing concentrate
• Disinfection

Product water finishing

• Activated carbon filtration
• UV disinfection
• Finishing fine filtration (1µm absolute)