Milk cooling needs to be started within 1 hour of its withdrawal from cattle and cooled to 4 C within 3 - 4 hours. Bulk milk coolers are quite prevalent across the world to chill milk at the farm level. In India, the milk is collected at village level societies is not cooled there itself but transferred through bike or van to large bulk milk cooler centers. The milk cooling is started after 2-3 hours from the point of its extraction, thus defeating the primary purpose of bulk milk cooler, and resulting in lower milk quality.

As there is no control on the timing to receive the milk at the milk chilling center, there is a desire to chill the milk as soon as it is received to improve the milk quality. In addition, variation in milk production between lean and flush seasons is about 2 times, leading to overfilling of BMCs during flush season. It results in longer cooling duration (~6 hours per shift). If dairy used a bigger Bulk milk cooler, it would have resulted in delayed starting of milk cooling during lean season as BMCs requires minimum 15% of milk to start the cooling operation.

Inficold has addressed these challenges present at large BMCs sites by ice energy storage integrated instant milk chilling system. Such a system instantly cools milk to less than 10 ⁰C, only requires 20 Litres of milk to start cooling process and works without a diesel generator.

The rapid milk chilling stops milk quality deterioration and bacterial growth. Instant milk chiller has an in-built ice energy storage, which provides instant cooling as and when required. It gets charged whenever electricity is available, allowing even elimination of diesel generator for locations with unreliable grid electricity. The system can be used either as a standalone unit or used as a pre-chiller to a Bulk Milk Cooler.

As the milk is instantly chilled, it allows the milk chilling centers to even double the milk chilling capacity of existing collection centers by shifting to dual lifting per day especially in flush seasons.

Instant milk chiller also acts as an additional source of cooling in case of malfunction of bulk milk cooler, thereby preventing milk spoilage.

There has been a tremendous push on dairies to adopt cleaner sources of energy. It becomes a challenge for large milk chilling centers as grid tie solar plant becomes non-functional during power outages. This system can be integrated with off grid solar photovoltaic panels for captive usage of solar energy.