Farm Frites is a global player in potato processing and French Fries production with several factories all over the world. Its potato-processing site located in Egypt lacked an adequate wastewater treatment facility. Recently, Waterleau redesigned and transformed the out-of-service and original wastewater treatment plant to comply with regulatory discharge regulations.

The wastewater is separated from the fats and greases in a pre-treatment step based on KROFTA® Dissolved Air Flotation technology.

Shifting from baking oil to sunflower oil for frying potato products makes it more difficult to implement dissolved air flotation technology to separate liquids from solids. To prevent fats from disrupting the efficient anaerobic treatment, a cross flow and plate parallel settler is integrated in the process, separating the wastewater from the starch, which is then de-watered via centrifuge.

Energy recovery is seldom mandatory in regions where oil resources are abundant. Low energy cost and limited availability of anaerobic granules probably explain the reluctance to adopting anaerobic wastewater technology in the Middle East.

With growing awareness for sustainable use of natural resources, limiting the water, energy and carbon footprint has become key.

Today, the BIOTIM® UASB technology allows for a stable supply of granular anaerobic sludge, making BIOTIM® anaerobic wastewater treatment a most-fit-for-purpose and cost-efficient wastewater treatment technology for the Egypt Farmfrites production plant.

Waterleau has acquired extensive expertise in potato processing and starch production wastewater treatment. More than 35 greenfield and existing potato processing production sites have implemented our wastewater treatment technology.

With a limited plot footprint excluding the construction of a new treatment facility, leaving upgrading the sole option for coping with production increase, strict project planning was key to keep the Farm Frites Egypt plant running at full capacity within a record timeframe.