Alkadet NP Removes Difficult to Remove Wax, Drastically Reduces Clean Time

Food & Beverage

Case Studies:

Opportunity

The customer is an apple processor. In nature, fruits are covered by a coating of wax that creates a natural barrier to reduce moisture loss. When it is harvested, the fruit is washed to clean off soil and dirt prior to sale – a process that oftentimes also removes the natural wax. Without this coating, the product is much more susceptible to accelerated shriveling or wilting and undesirable texture changes or other damage that affect the appearance and quality.
To keep the product crisp, bright, and shiny, apple manufacturers will apply an edible carnauba or shellac coating to the apples to replace the natural wax. In this process, apples are transported on a conveyor. They are given a gentle rinse, then inspected for quality, washed again, then sprayed from overhead with a thin layer of wax, sent through gentle brush rollers and a dryer to cure, then sent for sorting and packaging.
Due to the wax spray, the conveyor is prone to heavy soil build up, limiting the efficiency of the process and posing a contamination risk. Wax can be a particularly difficult material to remove – with their current process, the customer required upwards of 100 hours to fully clean their conveyor, a process that limited their capacity, strained their budget with heavy chemical and labor requirements, and introduced significant room for error that could further impact production output and product safety.
This provided DuBois the opportunity to remove the wax more efficiently and reduce cleaning time, thus increasing output and safety and decreasing the cost of goods sold through labor and chemical savings.

The DuBois Solution

DuBois partnered with the manufacturer to implement Alkadet NP, a low foaming, alkaline cleaner. Alkadet NP provides the performance of a solvent-based cleaner against greases, waxes, and oils without the use of hazardous or objectionable materials. The mixture of surfactants and alkali penetrate and solubilize many types of soils that are difficult to remove with more conventional products.

Results and Benefits

The customer began using Alkadet NP at a 5% dilution. They simply sprayed the solution onto the surface, allowed for 5 – 10 seconds of contact time, and manually wiped away. In this short amount of time, the wax was readily removed from the surface. This drastically reduced their manual cleaning hours and allowed operations to resume in much quicker time with improved product safety.