Milk products are extremely popular in Russia. Kefir, ryazhenka and sour cream are considered to be healthy food.  Not long ago, a new product appeared in the list – yogurt. To see which yogurt they eat in Russia, we are heading to Ehrmann company producing ‘Ermighurt’, ‘Prebiotic’, ‘Ermic’, etc.

Alois Ehrmann launched his company in Germany in 1920. It was the first company to produce yogurt containing pieces of real fruits which caused a stir among customers. Today, it is the most technically advanced yogurt factory in Germany. It began exporting its produce to Russia in 1997 and when its turnover reached 100 million German marks, the owners of the company decided to build a yogurt factory in Russia too. The factory opened in 2000 in Ramensky District, the Moscow Region. Today it produces a variety of yogurts and yogurt products such as sour cream, cottage cheese, puddings, desserts, milk shakes and yogurt drinks.

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A yogurt factory needs a lot of milk. They deliver milk to the factory from several regions of the country such as the Moscow Region, the Smolensk Region, the Vladimir Region, the Ryazan Region.

The milk tanker you see in the photo has brought about 20 tons of milk. Each milk tanker is equipped with a computer that makes accounting, prints bills and controls the temperature inside.

The factory needs about 215 tons of milk daily.

They test their milk before accepting it.

“Microbiological Laboratory”.

The production laboratory includes two departments, microbiological and physicochemical. In these departments, they examine raw produce (milk, ingredients), semi-finished products and finished products to make sure they are safe and of high quality.

A density test.

They store their refrigerated and filtered milk in these huge stainless steel reservoirs.

It should be sterile at the factory so they ask all visitors to put on a special overall, hat, shoes, put off their watches, rings and bracelets, and disinfect their hands.

The factory is a combination of pipes, sensors, wires and cables and it looks really impressing. Besides, they try to eliminate any contact between ingredients and environment or people which prolongs the shelf life of their yogurts.

This is a separator. It separates milk into non-fat milk and cream (to later mix them again but in other proportions).

In this sterile reservoir, they heat up their milk to +80C for a few days to kill bacteria to later refrigerate it which is called pasteurizing. Then, they add special ferments.

And this is where they turn their milk into yogurt by adding live yogurt bacteria delivered to the factory in hermetic packing. They ‘revive’ the bacteria by warming them up to +20C and add them into their milk.

The next stage includes homogenizing. In other words, they make sure that fat spreads evenly in their yogurt.

They control their production from this office.

These metal tanks contain fruit jam they add into their yogurt. In their yogurt, they add either natural fruits or fruit or berry puree or juice. To ensure that they do not go bad in several months, they pasteurize or, to put it simple, boil them.

The next stage includes refrigerating and another heat treatment (+60C to +80C).

Out of this purple thing, they make plastic containers (preliminary disinfecting it).

Foil gets into the packing machine at the same time as that purple plastic tape and seals up the containers.

Four containers are for the four members of a regular family (consisting of four persons, parents and two children).

After that, they sort them out and pack.

At the factory, you will see a lot of specialists from German who supervise the equipment.

Many of them have stated their families in Russia.

They take samples of yogurt for tests on a regular basis.

There are 11 production lines working at the factory at the same time.

One of them produces bottled yogurt.

They fill each bottle in two stages to make the line run faster.

They fill the bottle with nitrogen to oust the oxygen before sealing.

Every 30 minutes, they take 10 bottles from the line to make a check weighing.

Then they stick a label to each bottle.

Trial consignment.

In the lab, they carry out different tests, including sampling.

A centrifuge to determine the amount of fat.

Here they store their finished products.

Finally, it’s ready to be delivered to the stores of the country!

Location: The Moscow Region

via russos