Valio

Here is the report Ivon Drijer wrote of our visit to the dairy company Valio:


Today started better than in previous mornings since in the new hostel we had 3 showers per gender instead of 1 for the entire group as we had in the previous motel. After this perfect start in the morning we took the tram and train towards valio. Here we were welcomed by the vice president of Valio: Gerrit Smit who is also a “buitengewoon hoogleraar” at the University of Wageningen. For the ones that don't know Valio: Valio is a dairy producing company which is quite comparable to Friesland Campina. The company has approximately 4500 employees and only focus on branded products and thus not on private labels. The main market is Finland, Russia and Sweden. Another nice thing to mention about this company is that they spend a lot of time in R&D. It is a technology driven organization where also PhD students are working. Their main succes is the production of lactose free products.

Gerrit Smit receives some gifts

After the introduction of mr. Smit, Remko Boom gave an overview of the research done at Wageningen University after which several PhD students gave their presentation. The first one was given by Akmal Nazir about premix membrane emulsification. Next was Lena Jankowiak who presented her project about the separation of isoflavones from okara. Katarzyna Grabowska talked about flow induced protein fibrilization and Anja Warmerdam about enzymatic galacto-oligosaccharides production from lactose. Next was the presentation of Thomas Krebs about the demulsification kinetics studied with microfluidics. Finally Nirmal Patil gave a presentation about membrane cascading for downstream processing of biomolecules.

After the presentations of the PhD students we had a typical Finnish lunch in the canteen of Valio. Here some of the PhD students had garlic which we all could enjoy in the afternoon. After lunch we listened to two presentations by employees of Valio. The first one was by Harri Kallioinen about lactose intolerance, lactases and lactose hydrolysis. He explained among others that they produce lactose free products because of the high number of lactose intolerant people and that lactose free milk tastes more like the “normal” milk while low lactose products are more sweet.

The separation of lactose was discussed by Olli Tossavainen. He explained that most of the lactose was separated by using chromatography and the final amount of lactose was removed by using lactase. They could not remove all the lactose by only using chromatography or lactase because in the former the milk would not be sweet enough while in the latter the milk would be too sweet.

After the presentations of Valio we got a tour around the company. Here a very interesting thing was that one of the previous directors of Valio ( Prof. A.I. Virtanen) won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1945. In the company they had an office that resembeled the office of this professor including the original furniture.

Professor Virtanen's office

After the tour we took the train and tram back to the hostel and after a short break most of the group decided to go to the center to visit some churches of Helsinki. Unfortunately we only saw most of them from the outside since they closed at 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. After looking at the third closed door we decided to go to dinner despite the fact that Kevin really wanted to see some more closed stuf. We ate at a napolees restaurent after which we went back to the hostel. Here we could again enjoy the showers and since most were quite tired we went to sleep :)