Custom Stainless Steel Drum Heating Cabinets for Food Industry

LEWCO, Inc. recently delivered (4) custom steam heated drum cabinets to one of the largest dairy companies in the world, located in Saudi Arabia. This repeat customer ordered their first pair of drum cabinets from LEWCO back in 2013. Since then, the company has grown and now produces over one billion liters of dairy products each year. In order to keep up with production, the customer needed to be able to heat up to (192) 55-gallon drums at once. The result was (4) custom steam heated drum cabinets each with a capacity of (48) drums.

The hot boxes will be used to heat 55-gallon drums of Anhydrous Milk Fat (AMF) & Palm Oil.  AMF is used as an ingredient in a number of dairy products, as it provides a natural dairy flavor and creaminess.  At ambient temperature AMF is a solid, so in order to mix and blend it with other ingredients, it must be heated to 97°F. to change states to a liquid.

Due to sanitation requirements, the hot boxes were constructed with stainless steel and featured stainless steel NEMA 4x electrical enclosures. LEWCO’s standard controls were upgraded to include a Honeywell eZtrend® data logger. The eZtrend® allows the customer to collect, record, and graph current temperatures at each thermocouple, at any given time interval. This data can then be analyzed for any major temperature changes, which could have affected the products being heated.

For shipment overseas, the drum cabinets had to be disassembled into (3) pieces each. LEWCO Engineers provided clearly detailed reassembly instructions, along with all the necessary hardware to complete installation.  Reassembly and installation will usually take less than a day.