The ingredients of a bakery plant’s maintenance success

Ensuring safe and efficient plant production is an important component of a company’s maintenance strategy. At BakeMark SPA, the goal is to create the highest-quality products for customers, while continuously improving production rates and reducing maintenance requirements.

Located in Crema, Italy, southeast of Milan, the company has 500 employees in Italy and is part of the Dutch multinational group CSM. BakeMark strives to be the leading bakery ingredient supplier, and is the market leader for the production of mayonnaise, margarine and intermediates for bread and frozen sweets, with a production of more than 18,000 tons per year.

To find a solution for their ambitious goals, the company incorporated different maintenance philosophies including the advanced maintenance concept of Total Production Maintenance (TPM) and the implementation of the Japanese kaizen philosophy of continuous incremental improvements.

“To improve our production, we increase the responsibility of our operators,” says Fiorino Patrini, maintenance manager at the Crema plant. “To make their work easier, we were compelled to find the right lubricants partner.”

About eight years ago, BakeMark started to introduce Petro-Canada’s PURITY food-grade lubricants throughout the plant. This has allowed them to prolong the relubrication intervals and to better control the lubrication at critical points across the manufacturing process.

The Test

BakeMark SPA started their assessment of lubricant applications with their transport chains. Chains were cleaned and checked for proper operation daily. PURITY FG heavy chain fluid not only initially has good adherence to the chain, but also has continued adherence properties in use; even after pressure cleaning, the lubricant is still present where needed.

Product Benefits

Petro-Canada lubricants are formulated with base oils that are 99.9 percent pure. They are produced with the patented HT purity process, which produces crystal-clear fluids that are free of impurities that can hinder performance.

PURITY FG chain fluids have outstanding resistance to oxidative breakdown and provide excellent protection from wear and corrosion. Tough enough to handle wet food processing environments, their tacky nature allows them to adhere strongly to metal surfaces, resisting water washout and water spray loss.

The Results

BakeMark is very satisfied with the many benefits PURITY FG lubricants offer.

“We are getting much better performance from the production lines,” says Patrini. “We have reduced the expensive maintenance hours, and reduced the controls on the machinery.”

Petro-Canada offers a complete range of products which have provided effective solutions for BakeMark by meeting that manufacturer’s plant and machinery requirements. Following its positive experience with the use of PURITY FG heavy chain fluid, Petro-Canada’s food-grade lubricants have been incorporated into various applications throughout the plant. BakeMark is also currently using: PURITY FG grease, gear fluid, compressor fluid, heat transfer fluid, MF aerosol lubricant and REFLO 68A ammonia refrigeration compressor fluid.

The successful integration of PURITY food-grade products was due to the cooperation between BakeMark SPA and Petro-Canada Technical Services. Petro-Canada offers exceptional service through its wide network of authorized distributors and, more precisely in this case, through Emanuele Mascherpa S.P.A. Their knowledge and commitment to finding solutions that work for customers enables them to provide a total quality service offering.

The PURITY food-grade lubricants have demonstrated proven value and blended seamlessly within BakeMark’s overall philosophy of continued improvement.