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Seychelles Breweries Ltd - New cooling plant to boost health and safety |27 May 2016

Seychelles Breweries Limited has opened a new refrigeration plant which will significantly minimise the risks of exposure to ammonia, the primary refrigerant used for cooling in the production process.

The new R50 million plant is one of the most important investments for Seychelles Breweries Limited (SBL) in terms of health and safety of its employees and people residing and working within the vicinity of the brewery at Le Rocher.

SBL has also complemented the opening of the plant with a new boiler which  has cost approximately R20 million.

Both machineries are in the commissioning stage.

The event coincided with the visit of the president of Diageo Africa, John O’Keefe, who cut the ribbon to officially open the new plant together with the Minister for Environment, Energy and Climate Change Didier Dogley in the presence of the SBL managing director (MD) Nicholas Cook, regional MD Steve White and MD regional Africa market and SBL board chairman Steve Harvey.

Mr Cook said the plant will allow the brewery to brew a more consistent product of better quality.

“Cooling a brewery is key to everything. You need to control the temperature for brewing, fermenting, then packaging. If you cannot control this you get bad beer and you use up a lot more energy trying to put carbon dioxide in the beer if it is hot,” he said.

He noted that these new equipment are replacing old ones which have been there since 1972 and they were no longer able to control the temperatures so every batch of beer brewed ended up with a different taste.

“They both needed to be upgraded so it’s a significant investment to get us this kind of plant we need to be able to make good beer,” he said.

“We’re also looking at 15% of energy savings in terms of electricity and I think it will help us create a much more efficient brewery,” he added.

Minister Dogley said this very positive investment is a move in the right direction and expects SBL to give better products to the Seychellois and boost their competitiveness with other imported beverages.

“SBL is the second biggest manufacturing company in Seychelles after Indian Ocean Tuna (IOT), and we at the environment ministry are monitoring what goes on in the different factories producing goods in Seychelles. So for us it is very important to see them investing in safer, sustainable, environmentally friendly equipment compared to the ones they were using before,” he said.

He also commended the brewery for this investment and the efforts going into enhancing health and safety of the workers.

 

Touring the new facility

 

 

 

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