Sitting just outside of town and surrounded by thousands of acres of farmland, the former dairy plant has been retrofitted to accommodate the processes necessary to produce those four main product streams: protein, starch, fiber, and liquid. Regardless of the final product, all those perfect PURIS peas are first processed through Bühler milling equipment, a pivotal part of that smooth-running operation. “Quality and efficiency in the milling step are critical,” says Karels. “It sets the tone for the rest of the process. Bühler equipment helps us meet our production targets by remaining reliable. We turn it on, it runs. It does a phenomenal job of maintaining a particle size specification with little maintenance involved.” Karels credits the consistency of the milling process with the reliability of the downstream processes. “It impacts everything from the yield to the functionality of the final product.”
The building of the Dawson plant coincided with the building of the Bühler Food Application Center (FAC) in Plymouth, Minneapolis. This presented the perfect opportunity for the two companies to work together to optimize the milling process. “PURIS has always been an innovative company,” says Aidin Milani, Sales and Development Manager, Pulses and Spices at Bühler. “We wanted to make sure that we built enough flexibility into the system to accommodate new products in future.”
The FAC is a platform for developing new ways to transform peas, chickpeas, beans, corn, oats, special grains, and many other crops into flours, flakes, snacks, pasta, cereals, meat analogs, food ingredients, and a myriad of extruded products. And, as it turns out, this has proven to be a very useful resource for PURIS, and one they return to sometimes when they exercise their innovation muscles.