Started in 2003 with a blender, 256 pieces of fruit and 40 bottles, Nudie Juice has grown to be a market leader and well-loved Australian brand. Today, Nudie Juice uses over 93% of of their fruit from local sources and supply just under 20% of all fresh juice to every major supermarket chain and corner shop across Australia.Thanks to their winning formula of using only 100% juice and no additives, concentrates or preservatives, they are number one in the orange juice with pulp category. They are also highly innovative and were the first Australian company to introduce coconut water and juice with chia seeds.
The Situation
Under the advisement of Nudie’s refrigeration partner Amertec, Nudie were informed that upgrades needed to be carried out on their chiller unit in order for them to be able to keep up with their usual summer demand.
‘Our juice manufacturing equipment needs to be kept at sub zero temperatures, we do this through the use of a chiller system which utilises two separate circuits. We were unable to switch off one of the circuits to work on the other independently as with our constant demand and through put, the system simply wouldn’t keep up.’ Explains Tobias Dunn, Production Manager, Nudie Juice.
‘To keep production running whilst also carrying out the necessary upgrades so we could push through summer at full production we needed a supplementary chiller immediately. We rang our refrigeration partner, Amertec, who then rang Active Air Rentals.’
Amertec called Active Air Rentals around 10am on a Friday morning. After a technical discussion between the Amertec and Active Air Rentals teams a site visit was completed and installation started at 4pm that same day.
The Solution
Between 4pm and 11pm that Friday the Active Air Rentals team installed a 220 kW low temperature chiller and 200 kVA generator.
NSW State Manager, James Quintal explains, ‘The site was really tight. We had to place the temporary chiller system parallel to the permanent system, which is right near the delivery bay, so there was no room for error.
We installed the temporary chiller as a gravity fed system; pumping our chilled water into the top of their cooling tank with a flange system at the base to draw out the warm water and feed it back into our temporary chiller.’
The Results
The temporary system enabled Tobias and his team to upgrade the permanent chiller with no production down time and increased capacity moving into summer.
‘The service was exceptional.’ Tobias explains. ‘The Active Air guys were there for us at any time; late nights, weekends, nothing was a problem. They were always available for technical support too. The first time we switched it off we rang Active Air and they were right there with us to ensure nothing went wrong. Their support’s been fabulous.’
Support wasn’t the only benefit of working with the Active Air Rentals team;