Wenba Jiuling (WeChat*** Wu Xiaobo Channel).
It resembles a silver dragon, entrenched in the factory, with a vertical height of nearly 18 meters alone.
Teacher Wu and the students stood outside the glass, and they could already feel the heat coming from inside.
This is a drying tower that quickly atomizes the concentrated milk and dries it into powdered milk pellets.
With only 8 days to go before the Chinese New Year, the students who walked into the benchmark factory project came to Harbin, which is surging in popularity this year, not to see the ice and snow, but to visit the world's most advanced milk powder factory: Feihe Milk Powder Factory.
Never seen a device like this anywhere else! ”
The food industry actually has such a high evaporator? ”
The trainees visited all the way and exclaimed in disbelief along the way.
This time, Leng Youbin, chairman of Feihe, personally accompanied Mr. Wu and the students to visit the factory. He was born into a northeastern family that raised cattle and has nearly 40 years of experience in the milk powder industry along with experience milking cows as a teenager.
"I haven't done anything else except milk powder," he said. ”
Economist Zhang Aoping is one of the mentors of the benchmark factory, and the shock brought to him by Feihe is that the strategic adjustment in the context of different times is timely. After a visit, many students understoodThese seemingly "achievements that step on the melody of the times" are piled up with solid efforts in the industrial chain.
On a small can of milk powder, there was also a past of being held hostage.
The current lactoferrin production line will be launched in 2022 after 6 years of R&D and commissioning.
Don't underestimate lactoferrin, without it, China may not have a qualified can of infant formula.
In the past, the lactoferrin added by Feihe was imported from Europe and the United States. The European and American cheese markets are developed, and the raw material of lactoferrin is whey, which is only a by-product of cheese making, so it is not complicated to prepare lactoferrin abroad.
A European company has absolute control over the Chinese market, controlling half of the country's imported lactoferrin raw materials, and once their own demand increases, the domestic dairy company faces the possibility of cutting off the supply of lactoferrin.
Leng Youbin and Mr. Wu came to the lactoferrin production line, and the engineer told the story.
Feihe's innovation is to extract lactoferrin from skim milk and add it back to milk powder. Technological innovation requires the undertaking of technology and equipment. In 6 years, Feihe has invested hundreds of millions of yuan, and the equipment in front of him is at the same level as the equipment of top pharmaceutical companies, and such equipment is also used to prepare new crown vaccines, human blood albumin.
For Feihe, the extraction of lactoferrin is not a simple matter of changing equipment.
Different from the traditional process, in order to maintain the activity of lactoferrin, the raw milk will not be pasteurized first, but will be deskimmed and then entered into the chromatography system and ultrafiltration system at about 55 degrees Celsius, and finally sterilized by FDA pharmaceutical-grade sterilization membrane cold sterilization.
The liquid dispensing line in the pharmaceutical industry is about a few tons per day, and Feihe's production line has a huge capacity, processing more than 300 tons of skim milk per day, so the equipment needs to integrate multiple systems to increase the capacity.
After understanding the demand of Feihe, the first reaction of foreign equipment manufacturers is to seize the market and develop such equipment to sell to Feihe. Leng Youbin knows that if he continues to use customized equipment provided abroad, he will also be "stuck".
As a result, Feihe and domestic factories independently developed and debugged, applied for 9 national invention patents in the field of process control alone, and developed a large-capacity, high-rate lactoferrin production line, which is the only industrial production line that can extract lactoferrin in China.
Compared with the world's mainstream processes, the biological activity and protein integrity of lactoferrin extracted by Feihe are better.
Such a large pre-treatment system can process 300 tons of raw milk a day, "which is unimaginable in the pharmaceutical industry." "A trainee from the pharmaceutical industry stopped for a long time in front of the lactoferrin production line.
Not long after he walked into the factory, Mr. Wu sold it.
Covers an area of 3620,000 square meters, construction area 10The 40,000-square-meter Harbin factory has to go through a total of 411 testing processes from the entry of raw materials to the warehousing of finished products.
Let's guess how many people are needed here? The answer was revealed a few hours later, including researchers and operators, and only more than 100 people were needed. This answer not only shocked the students, but also made Mr. Wu himself feel incredible.
One of the core links in Feihe's milk powder production is the control of the drying tower, and even here, very little manpower is required.
Standing on the roof of the 38-meter drying tower and visiting the glass window, the trainees can clearly see that the spray gun is inserted obliquely around the drying tower, just like the umbrella bone on the umbrella surface, and the dual-material system can alternately produce continuously for more than 20 days when the production capacity is fully opened.
Each time the atomized particles will be screened, the large particles will pass through, and the small particles will be removed from the exhaust system and returned to the drying tower to become larger particles, which can make the milk powder particles more uniform and easier to dissolve.
The engineer explained to the trainees the difference between other milk powder granules and Feihe, which may be a grapefruit in the middle with grapes scattered next to it, while Feihe's milk powder is a number of apples placed together with a few grapes next to it.
In the production area, the staggered density of pipes is like sitting on an airplane overlooking the city viaduct, and the pipe opening and closing are controlled by automatic control valves, while the traditional process may require workers to open the hand valve to switch the production line, which will increase the probability of error.
In Feihe, the switching materials and production lines are all automatically controlled through the background, and there will be three calibrations and three alarms when abnormalities are found, which can ensure the absolute safety of the products. Except for some inspections, the production process rarely requires human intervention, and it can be "human downtime".
Although Feihe currently ranks first in China in terms of market share, there are still ways to self-supervise in terms of internal management.
Feihe is the first dairy company in China to introduce the AIB international review system for unannounced inspectionsIn Mr. Wu's view, AIB is a globally recognized thing that only a good company dares to do - Feihe hires top experts to conduct flight inspections, which requires Feihe itself to ensure high quality standards at all times no matter at what time, in which factory, in which workshop, and in which production line.
Feihe's employees told the trainees: "It is possible that they are still in a meeting, and someone suddenly informs them that the industry blues have changed their clothes and entered the workshop for inspection."
At the same time, Feihe also encourages employees to find problems internally. For example, Feihe is involved in decisions on food safety and regulatory red lines, and anyone, including front-line operators, has a veto on the decision.
The role of management is reflected in the quality of products, the protein and dry matter content of Feihe milk powder are much higher than the national standard and the EU standard, and the colony index is 20 times better than the EU standard and 400 times better than the national standard.
Leng Youbin, who was born in a cattle family, after taking over Feihe, the first thing was the source. From the time he became the factory director, he was determined to change the mode of cattle raising little by little.
So, in 2006, after visiting an American farm and being touched, Leng Youbin decided to build his own ranch.
He said:"A good business must think about tomorrow. ”This sums up not only the past, but also the future.
Even at the moment, it is difficult for us to associate the connection between brain development and a can of milk powder, but Feihe's brain development research has been carried out for many years, and top brain researchers at home and abroad have cooperated with Feihe to study the precise nutritional needs of brain development.
Leng Youbin said that "brain science research" is like a key, opening a door for us to the future of human health and life. Feihe's exploration of brain science is to set up a fulcrum at a critical stage in a person's life and support the countless possibilities of his or her future.
This is Feihe's expectation for the future, and it is also the cause of every Feihe person's perseverance and lifelong efforts.
Walk into the benchmark factory 2024, select domestic benchmark factories, and explore new innovations in intelligent manufacturing. In the future, we will walk into more smart factories, if you are interested, we invite you to walk together.