Italian company leader in the meat industry seeks partnerships within a commercial agreement with technical assistance or a license agreement aimed to improve its plants' energy efficiency

The Italian company - located in the Lombardy region - is one of the leading players in the meat industry, operating both at the national and international levels. It produces different types of cured meats: • Salami • Cooked ham • Cured ham • Mortadella • Beef Bresaola • Pancetta Rolled It has great expertise in the field, thanks to more than 100 years of experience. The company is willing to cooperate either under a commercial agreement with technical assistance or a license agreement. In both cases, the company is looking for partners interested in providing a technology aimed to improve the energy management of the factories. It can rely on two large production plants where the processing of cured meats and their subsequent packaging take place. The core of the request concerns the energy efficiency of the whole dehumidification process - highly energy-intensive - but essential for the treatment and transformation of meat. Specifically, the dehumidification of the rooms used for the curing of salami and dry-cured hams in its factories takes place in two distinct ways: 1. A passage into successive coils: the humid air passes through a cold coil with a sufficiently low temperature to lower the latent heat and thus allow the moisture to condense on the coil surfaces. The dehumidified air then passes through a hot battery in order to restore the sensible heat and therefore the set temperature. 2. A passage into the dehumidifier: the humid air passes through a surface made of a hygroscopic material that absorbs moisture, which is then eliminated from the material by hot air. Because of this, the dehumidified air acquires sensible heat and therefore increases in temperature, so there is a subsequent passage through a cold battery that removes only the sensible heat. Both systems are managed by dedicated software that intervenes on the valves of hot and cold fluids in order to ensure the efficiency of dehumidification with the lowest possible energy consumption. Air diffusion occurs through forced ventilation to ensure maximum uniformity of distribution in the environment. As for consumption, the company is equipped with a detection system on transformers that allows categorizing consumption, but it would like to enhance the accuracy. At the moment it is difficult to attribute precisely the consumption only dedicated to the air conditioning system. The final goal of the company is to rationalize energy consumption during the meat dehumidification processes (which is an essential step in order to ensure a high level of quality of the cured meats) hence reducing costs and also energy waste for the benefit of the environment. For these reasons, the company seeks partnerships either under a commercial agreement with technical assistance or a license agreement in order to access the abovementioned technology. In case of a commercial agreement with technical assistance, the company must be assisted in-depth with the implementation of the technology and related issues, in order to train the allow the team to manage and use it correctly and fully. In case of a license agreement, the company will acquire the licensed technology in exchange for a fee. Furthermore, the company is available to join a partnership in order to participate in an EU-funded project focused on energy efficiency (for instance the LIFE call). It would make its plants available to test one or more technologies capable of reducing energy consumption, making the dehumidification processes smarter and more efficient, and at the same time reducing the environmental impact of its production chain.