A Roaster Heat Recovery Process to Reduce Energy Consumption and Waste in the food supply chain

Coffee is the most valuable and widely traded tropical agricultural product. Global consumption has almost doubled in the last 40 years and is forecast to reach 9.09 m tonnes by 2019. Roasting and afterburning processes use roughly 11.2x10(12) kJ fuel energy/year. In coffee bean roasting processes only 40% of energy used adds value to the final product with 60% being discharged as hot air emissions. The forecast increase in coffee consumption will exacerbate this problem over the next 5 years. We propose to develop a novel heat recovery solution that will recover 30% of the input energy in a roasting process, increase energy efficiency to 70% and reduce energy costs by 33%. The technology we are proposing can be integrated into existing manufacturing systems and produce high temperature water at 140 degC that can be used in coffee bean roasting processes. This project is a collaboration between Nestle Spirax & the National Centre of Excellence in Food Engineering to build a manufacturing demonstrator for the coffee roasting industry that can be disseminated to multiple food & drink processes.