Mikkel Svold (00:10):
Jesper Kjeldal, welcome to the show. Let’s, I think first establish who you are. You’re the sales director at MMS Nordic, and MMS Nordic, you develop membrane solutions for the dairy industry and farm industry. And you yourself has been in the dairy industry for nearly 25 years, something like that.

Jesper Kjeldal (00:31):
Correct, yeah.

Mikkel Svold (00:33):
And today, I think we are diving right into your specific expertise because we are diving into how you can maximize value of your raw milk using different separation technologies. Welcome, first of all.

Jesper Kjeldal (00:45):
Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Mikkel Svold (00:47):
I think just at least, if not for anyone else, then for my sake, let’s establish, what are separation techniques and why are they important in dairy?

Jesper Kjeldal (01:01):
Well, what now you said, I was 25 years in the dairy industry. I’ve been 25 years in the industry supplying through the dairy industry.

Mikkel Svold (01:09):
Gotcha.

Jesper Kjeldal (01:09):
But that’s no problem with that. And as you said, we are doing separation technologies here, designing machines for that, and we are doing that with the separation technology used membranes, membrane filtration, and that has basically been around for, I don’t know, 30, 40 years minimum. It’s basically the still technique that just keeps improving and has more and more we can say, usage in the industry to make value-added products. What we see is just if you want to add value to your product, you said the milk, you had the milk, as you said, raw milk or pasteurized milk as you should legally, then you can use separation technologies to add value. You have a range of separation technologies, evaporator, spray dryers also to remove water and make powder and so on, but the difference from that way remove water to membrane technology is that you can customize your milk here. You can split all the components in the milk into each fraction, lactose, minerals, proteins and so on, and then you can combine them again in a customized solution. That’s basically membrane filtration.

Mikkel Svold (02:12):
I think before we dive right into that, because that’s one of the really exciting things to talk about.

Jesper Kjeldal (02:17):
Yes.

Mikkel Svold (02:17):
I think I just want to know, it’s a very niche place to land in your career.

Jesper Kjeldal (02:22):
Yeah.

Mikkel Svold (02:23):
I know that Denmark, where we sit, and especially actually the area that we sit in the middle of Jutland, it is very dairy heavy, but how did you come about, where did you first learn about separation techniques?

Jesper Kjeldal (02:35):
That’s as you said, in close to 25 years ago. In the summer of 2001, I finished my study as a mechanical engineer and then I looked, back there, there was newspapers in real paper. I looked in the newspaper and I saw one of the companies who today is my competitor, was seeking for a project manager for membrane filtration systems. I went there and I took the interview and we went to the workshop and saw one machine, and luckily for me, that was before you were testing personalities and so on. After 40 minutes, the boss of that company, he gave me the hand and said, “Do you want the job? Then you can take the job.” So then I started in summer 2001, and then I’ve been in this business ever since in three or four or five companies supplying this carbon of application to the industry.

Mikkel Svold (03:22):
When you think back, the filtration system that you were looking at in 2001.

Jesper Kjeldal (03:28):
Yeah.

Mikkel Svold (03:29):
Does that at all look like what it looks like today or is it more like the development of the cell phone?

Jesper Kjeldal (03:34):
I would like to say that it was really different back then, but basically, it looked very much the same from looking from the outside, the physical appearance of the machine, a lot of stainless steel pipes, membrane housings for these famous filters and so on. But inside, the technology has happened a lot, I would say. That has really developed in this 25 years, the quality, I don’t know if we talk about that now, but the quality of the filters where you can use them, and also the awareness in the business of using this technology because traditional dairy, milk, butter, cheese, so on, and then this membrane filtration with some filters inside, that’s a mumbo jumbo technology for some customers. We still see places around the world where that’s rather new applications still actually, despite the internet and all the knowledge you can find everywhere.

Mikkel Svold (04:33):
But then rewinding a little bit, what is the technology that is, I don’t know if you can say more commonly known still or the traditional, more traditional way of filtering of working with your raw milk, what would those be? You mentioned some of them before.

Jesper Kjeldal (04:51):
Well, yeah, traditional, I think if you had a dairy, back in the days, you had the milk, you had the cream, the butter, you made the cheese, and you still find that, for example in South Europe where what is the real product in the mind of a small cheese dairy in Italy, that’s the famous family cheese, right? The hard cheese that everyone enjoys to eat. And then you have, we can say a secondary product, which is the whey which is coming out of the cheese production and that you still find areas where that’s less, we can say value product this whey, and then you can take the contrast to some of the big players here in Scandinavia, North Europe where whey is, I would say almost it is a higher value product than the cheese almost.

Mikkel Svold (05:40):
Okay.

Jesper Kjeldal (05:40):
Because they simply can separate the whey in so many forms.

Mikkel Svold (05:44):
When did that development happen?

Jesper Kjeldal (05:46):
That has been ongoing-

Mikkel Svold (05:47):
Actually, because the whey used to be not just a secondary product, but a waste, an actual waste.

Jesper Kjeldal (05:54):
Actual waste, yeah.

Mikkel Svold (05:55):
Yeah.

Jesper Kjeldal (05:56):
I guess back in the days, you gave it to the river on the farmlands, and then you gave it to the pigs and the households, and you still do that somewhere in the world where you have smaller volumes, but then it gradually increased and you used it in the food industry and this whey protein is a very nutritious protein, so by concentrating that, you get a very nutritional product and you have a lot of functionality in that whey protein.

(06:20):
That had happened gradually, I would say probably not so far from this office, there is some factories who are some of the first movers in the world about that, and that’s back in the middle ’70s I would say. That started slowly where some in brackets (crazy) people started to say there must be a value in processing this whey. And they are some of the cutting edge factories today, I would say making really specialized products. So it has been a journey over, well, I’m from ’75, so that’s been a journey over 50 years basically to develop that and it’s not finished. I would say it’s still ongoing to make even smaller fractions out of not only the milk, but especially the whey for the ingredients business.

Mikkel Svold (07:08):
I want to again come back to, just to line them up, what kinds of separation techniques would you see when you walk around a typical dairy production, let’s say in Denmark? Because I suspect that there’ll be differences in the world, no?

Jesper Kjeldal (07:26):
Yeah. Well, dairy production, then if we go a little bit away from classical dairy products that we talked before, but for example, a very used technology is if you want to make powder. That could be a protein powder for whey or milk, then you have typically a evaporator and a spray dryer. You remain with somewhere between 3% to 6% moisture in your powder back, and then you need a spray drying technology, like when you use your hairdryer at home to take out the last moisture of your hair. Hot air basically, right? But then other technologies out of membrane filtration is also electrodialysis, ion exchange and these things to remove minerals, you do that for whey also. We can come back to that. There are different say philosophies of how to processing your whey depending on the world market prices for the different products.

(08:17):
And then you have for a dairy for example, you could have classical. If you do cheese, you could use, we have four technologies here typically. That’s RO, NF, UF, and MF four filtration technologies. If we talk about the separation technology called filtration. If you do cheese, it’s very typical to standardize the protein on a UF filter or MF filter so that, because when you have the yearly variation in protein content from the cow basically, then it’s nice to standardize that to the same level, and normally it’s slightly higher than the normal 3.3% protein. Then you standardize, for example, 4% protein every day all over the year, and that simply increases your yields in the cheese line. That means you can have a higher throughput of proteins, and that means higher outcome of cheese in the same processes equipment. If you start by having a filtration system, for example, on your raw milk tanks for protein standardization or combined with your pasteurizer.

Mikkel Svold (09:18):
Try and explain that to me again, why is that? Why is different from having it in the beginning rather than having it later on? What’s the difference?

Jesper Kjeldal (09:27):
That’s because you do a volume reduction. You take out some of the minerals and some of the lactose that anyway ends up in the cheese whey when you drain your cheese wet. By taking that out as a UF permeate through a filter, then you can have a more concentrated milk substance with higher protein and protein is what is making the cheese. You make more cheese out of the same flow rate you can say throughout your processing area.

Mikkel Svold (09:56):
Okay, gotcha. And just to establish, some of you are already throwing a lot of abbreviations here. UF is the ultra filtration.

Jesper Kjeldal (10:04):
Yes.

Mikkel Svold (10:04):
And the MF is the micro filtration.

Jesper Kjeldal (10:06):
Perfect.

Mikkel Svold (10:07):
What else do we have? RO?

Jesper Kjeldal (10:09):
Then we had the RO, that’s the reverse osmosis, and then the NF is the nano filtration.

Mikkel Svold (10:15):
Nano filtration.

Jesper Kjeldal (10:16):
Yeah.

Mikkel Svold (10:17):
And here at MMS Nordic, you do the filters or you develop the filtration systems?

Jesper Kjeldal (10:25):
The systems, yeah.

Mikkel Svold (10:25):
So is that both the UF, the MF and the NF? I can’t name the-

Jesper Kjeldal (10:31):
Yeah, the four technologies. Yeah, we use the four technologies, the four well-known technologies I would say. And then just to make it even more confusing, then in each of these overall technologies, you have a huge range of different membranes and different characteristics and qualities and cutoff values in each membrane. So basically, our knowledge is to guide the customer to, if he wants to make this and this product with this yield or this quality, then we are proposing this membrane, and so it’s always a trade-off.

Mikkel Svold (11:04):
Describe to me, what does it look like then when either you contact a potential client or a client comes to you and says, “We want to do X,” then what happens.

Jesper Kjeldal (11:17):
Then, first of all, they normally not only call, but send an email maybe also with some material, three or four PowerPoints with some concepts. And then just recently then I said to a customer, “Let’s have a meeting,” and I went to the contract where they have their dairy and we sat for a couple of days and talked about the concept because the thing is, it’s always good to start on the right conceptual basis before we go into the details. First of all, we start about the overall process and many times the customer, the big players, they know what they want and they have maybe a similar process and then it’s just an easy go.

(11:56):
And then we do what we call mass balance. Basically, what we do is we take one stream milk whey, permeates, whatever, waste water, and then we split that into a concentrate stream that we retain on the backside of the filter and a permeate stream that is permeating the filter. And then when we have the concept in place, then I make some balances to show how much, if you put this stream in, then you have so much in this stream and so much in this stream and you can run so many hours and you pay so much for cleaning the membranes also. And so that’s basically it. And then that’s the technology discussion. That’s the heart of the machine.

(12:32):
Behind that is then the long discussion about which pumps and valves and stainless steel quality and all that, right, and the room layout and so on. But that’s the mechanical side of it. What is making the product is the technology inside and the right choice of membranes where we then, because they can buy those membranes themselves, but we then come with our guarantees to how long can they produce between the cleaning, what is the quality after two years of the product, what is the yield and so on. We can say, “This is the product we are selling, this is the knowledge about these things,” and backed up by of course contractual.

Mikkel Svold (13:06):
And then when you have these kinds of discussions with potential clients or with existing clients that need to redevelop something, what’s important to them typically?

Jesper Kjeldal (13:22):
For them, the people at customer side which contact you first is normally product development or salespeople or people who wants to make new products because the business case could be a good one. The return on investment could interesting, right? So your question again was? Which people ask me?

Mikkel Svold (13:52):
What’s typically important to them when they come to you?

Jesper Kjeldal (13:54):
Important is typically, well, basically how much power do we use, how much water, steam, hot water, chemicals to clean, how much compressed air, all these kinds of, and basically also consumables, also footprint, how much space does it take out because do we need to build a new building for this equipment? All these consumables is important, and then important is also the composition of the product we can make with this specific membrane if it is a protein concentrate or something, can you meet this specification because they’re going to sell it at the bag and they’re going to sell that milk protein concentrate or that whey protein isolate.

(14:33):
They have an outlet channel in which they’re going to sell it on a specification, their customer wants to buy it. I need to promise we can keep that specification with our machine for X amount of time. Before then, of course the filters is a wear and tear part. At some point, the characteristics of the product will change because the filter is changing and then you need to replace the filter. That’s a consumable, these filters. This is what they’re looking at, what can we produce, what is the cost to produce it? And of course, what is my investment also, but more and more important is also how much does it cost to run this process? That’s the yearly income to sell and make and sell this product. This is what they’re looking for. And then downstream, that comes all the people who wants to talk about mechanical standards and so on. But that’s when you can say the next level, right? First it’s the process.

Mikkel Svold (15:22):
I think talking about this, well, the specifications and because the specifications as I understand it, is basically what creates the value. If you can meet certain specifications, they can put it into a product that is worth more.

Jesper Kjeldal (15:37):
Yeah.

Mikkel Svold (15:39):
The development in how you use different fragments and put them into a specific product, how you design a specific product, how has that developed since 25 years ago and up until now? Are the final end products, are they much more designed now or are they just what you can do?

Jesper Kjeldal (16:06):
Much, much sharper now and because-

Mikkel Svold (16:11):
The reason why I’m asking is also because I would expect actually to see some of the really big dairy companies, dairy production companies, they’re at the forefront of this. So that is what, if you are smaller sized, you might look up to them. What are they doing right now that the other ones that the medium-sized ones should be looking out for?

Jesper Kjeldal (16:32):
Yeah, you’re right. Well, first of all, to maybe if we compare 20, in the start of this discussion here, I said it looks basically the same, but that’s the stainless steel, it looks the same, in some parts if you look at it. But on the inside, these filters that come in, the control of the pH, the temperature, the cross-flow, velocity of the filters, all these kind of things, processing aids and so on, has developed tremendously. And the quality of the filters and the specifications of the filters, that you can really specify it much more sharply to produce this filter. That means we can make much more specified products today out of the machines and the customers, the big players, as you say, they know that. They have really sharp specification, how much lactose, how much protein, how much minerals, which minerals to keep and so on in their specifications. They’re asking what we call KPI, key processing indicators for that, performance indicators for that, so we have to live up to that of course.

(17:29):
The other point about that is also the more you said, what are the big ones doing that this medium size should look up to? I would say being in our business where you separate things, the big ones are separating finer and finer. When we talked about whey, for many, many years, it’s been either concentrating whey, making a whey protein concentrate. That’s what you eat when you go into fitness and you take this powder, you blend with some water when you get home.

Mikkel Svold (17:58):
Yeah, I do a lot of that obviously.

Jesper Kjeldal (17:59):
Yeah, you look very big. But that’s the whey protein. But next, not even next level, because some of the real big forefront players has been doing that for years is to split even further the range of whey proteins, not considering the whey proteins as one, we can say name of a group of proteins, but also the different, the lacta, the beta and the different lactoferrin protein also you have in the milk and also in the whey, splitting that into finer and finer fractions. That’s what the big players are doing. But you can do that if you have economy of scale. You need quite some volumes of raw material because some of the most expensive components that you want to take out and normally use, typically they’re taken out because you want to put them in a formulated ingredient for nutrition, for babies, mother milk substitution of course.

Mikkel Svold (18:55):
Is that where the big bucks are?

Jesper Kjeldal (18:57):
That is also where the big bucks are.

Mikkel Svold (19:02):
Return on investment.

Jesper Kjeldal (19:02):
There’s a lot of babies around the world, and there’s a lot of growing middle class around the world in China, India and so on, and they want to have the best product for their children.

Mikkel Svold (19:13):
Of course.

Jesper Kjeldal (19:14):
If you can compose your mother milk in the can in a way that it looks actually like a real mother’s milk from a human, because that’s not the same as the cow, the cow and women’s milk is not the same. But if you can compose that by adding all these components together, then you have a value. And that’s what is also done for all this early life nutrition as it called, but also elderly people because a lot of elderly people, they don’t eat a lot when the hospital are in the elderly home. I don’t know if that’s called in English, so they don’t eat enough and they get very thin, and then you need to have a really nutritious product for them.

(19:52):
So also that has been made, ice cream with whey proteins in it, and a lot of high nutritional products. They’re not so specialized. It’s more the protein addition, but the specialized product. And the thing is, when you take out these really small components of the product, of the milk and whey, then you have a lot of other stuff left over when you stole the few expensive components you want. And that has been the challenge throughout the years to find what we can say a value or find a home for the leftover. But that has also developed tremendously, that you need to find a business case for each of the streams in your fractionation process.

Mikkel Svold (20:33):
And if you sit out there listening and you’re the head of technique or head of production at a medium-sized dairy product production facility, what will you then do? Are you doomed? Because you say that it’s about volume, so you can either not do anything, or you can probably sell your whey to the bigger players. Is that the way going forward, or do you see also processes coming into there that’s possible to implement on a smaller scale?

Jesper Kjeldal (21:11):
I see that coming, but not on the same level of picking the real small pieces out because it’s really heavy stuff. You also need a big, you cannot just do that by calling a supplier. You need to have your knowledge in-house also with a big R&D department and years of experience. But the medium-sized players, we still continuously see that a lot of the customers want to, maybe instead of making WPC 35, which is a 3% whey protein concentrate, then they want to make WPC 80, which is maybe 22%, 24% protein. And that’s just in brackets a pure ultra filtration process where you take out some lactose and minerals.

(22:05):
For some players, medium players, that’s the next step is to go to higher WPC level where some of the big, big forefront players you’re talking about, they have been doing that for years and they have maybe been doing a WPI, a protein isolate where or more than 90% purity of proteins in your total solid substance. They are moving the same direction. But one day, the joke in the business is that the cheese is the secondary product because.

Mikkel Svold (22:35):
But is that not already?

Jesper Kjeldal (22:36):
If you say the whey protein, it’s already worth a lot.

Mikkel Svold (22:39):
For some.

Jesper Kjeldal (22:40):
There are some big Scandinavian dairy companies where the majority of the margin is in the ingredients business, I think we can say that without spoiling too much.

Mikkel Svold (22:52):
The actual milk in the fridge that I go down and buy, that’s actually the byproduct of the real thing.

Jesper Kjeldal (22:56):
Well, yeah. It’s funny of course, but not in reality, and you couldn’t know that by law you cannot play on milk. You can only play on the fat level in milk. You’re not allowed to take out components of the milk and then sell it as a drinking milk.

Mikkel Svold (23:12):
Gotcha.

Jesper Kjeldal (23:15):
For example, some of the bigger ones, they also take out the lactoferrin, the iron protein from the milk, which you also put in the baby formula and they take out the lactoferrin from the milk, and after that you cannot sell it as a consumer’s milk. Then you can make a protein powder or something, but not called milk anymore because just changed the composition of the milk. It’s only fat that you can change in milk.

Mikkel Svold (23:38):
Okay.

Jesper Kjeldal (23:38):
That’s by law.

Mikkel Svold (23:39):
Okay.

Jesper Kjeldal (23:39):
And that’s to protect the consumer. If you see for example, in the fridge, as you said in the supermarket, if there’s something called milk drink, then you cannot taste the difference. But then basically it is still milk, but they stole something out of it or they took out the lactose or something, and then it should not be called milk, but milk drink. A small difference, no one noticed. And it’s not because it’s dangerous, it’s just because you took out some, you still have all the good nutritional value in the milk left still no problem. But that’s simply by law.

Mikkel Svold (24:12):
Yeah.

Jesper Kjeldal (24:13):
Consumer perception.

Mikkel Svold (24:14):
I presume that it’s also the reason why almond milk stopped being called almond milk because it’s not milk.

Jesper Kjeldal (24:19):
It’s not milk.

Mikkel Svold (24:20):
It’s not milk.

Jesper Kjeldal (24:22):
And it never were milk, yeah.

Mikkel Svold (24:25):
I know that this is not what you work with from day to day, but again, you have a look into what’s happening out there. So just out of curiosity, what do you expect for new products? Do you see anything coming up in the horizon? I know it’s not what you do, but that’s the fun of it.

Jesper Kjeldal (24:47):
Yeah, of course. When you go to seminars and Congress and so on, you pick up something, you pick up something because people are so kind that they even talk about what they want to do. I think, is it in Holland where by law they are reducing the number of cows actually to meet the carbon dioxide demand? So one could argue at some point, there are less cows and less milk in the world, but at least, and then you have other technologies and they are very well known in the pharma industry where we also work with bioreactors and fermenters and so on. And then you have a certain food stock and a strain of DNA, and then you combine that on the right conditions in a bioreactor with the right temperature and oxygen and whatever processing aids, and then you can create exactly the protein you’re looking. Then the majority of the milk protein is the casein, for example. You can do that in a tank instead of in a cow.

Mikkel Svold (25:49):
And are we still there where it’s cheaper to do it in a cow or is it now cheaper to do it in a tank?

Jesper Kjeldal (25:55):
Then we should talk with some of the people, some of the who are supplying the tank. It’s not just a tank, it’s a bioreactor. It’s a heavy piece of equipment, very costly. Probably since you have the cow, it’s still cheaper. I will not talk about what is the cheapest one, but what I could say is that probably that will happen. Should I then be afraid if the cow is dying? No, because we started the interview, we said we deliver to biotech, startup, plant-based, pharma, everything. That means when you do that in a tank, then you harvest your protein out, but you have all the other substance, dead cells and water, whatever, so you have a lot, downstream that fermenter, you have a lot of filtration processes still. So in that sense, it’s still a big value add. You still need to process that you’re doing in the tank, right?

Mikkel Svold (26:45):
I think a nice segue, I’ve been sitting here and marking this question for a couple of minutes now, and I think one thing that I want to ask you is because when you’re talking dairy production and you’re talking, you have farmers and they have hundreds of cows, so the milk producers, the dairy factories, they have a responsibility to take in whatever comes. They can’t deny, say, “No, we don’t have the demand for that milk right now,” they just have to take it in. And how do you actually use separation techniques to balance that supply and demand that skewness that it might create? Also, just a simple thing, if you have a lot of, what’s it called? Unconventional milk? Unconventional cows. Ecological cows.

Jesper Kjeldal (27:34):
Yeah.

Mikkel Svold (27:35):
So when you put them on grass, the milk production may go a little bit down for a period and go up. So how do you use separation techniques to balance that out?

Jesper Kjeldal (27:45):
Well, first of all, you can, I guess that’s more on the dairy producer side, that you can play between your cheese production, you can make powders also. You can balance it in some way, you seasonal variation of volume, but also what we do from time to time, there is a lot of transportation. Some claim from time to time that some of the biggest transport companies in Europe are the dairy companies because they transport a lot of milk and wait, so what you can do, we talked about reverse osmosis before. That is a very tight and dense membrane that basically extracts water and a little bit of nitrogen, but if you look at it and taste it in a cup, it’ll taste like water without minerals then, a little bit flat I would say.

(28:30):
But that’s a technology where you can, if you have a surplus of milk, let’s say for example in your dairy in a certain region in Denmark, and you don’t have more processing capacity because you have too much milk coming in at those two, three months, then you can concentrate that on the reverse osmosis and the milk normally is 9% to 12% solids depending on the fat level, and then you can concentrate that three to four times up to 35%, 40% if you want.

Mikkel Svold (28:58):
Just by taking away the water.

Jesper Kjeldal (29:00):
Just by taking away the water. Then you can put it in a truck and then you can transport it to Germany or Sweden or where you have maybe some processing capacity. In that way, you can balance it by filtration technology and also by taking away the water.

Mikkel Svold (29:13):
You don’t have to use 10 trucks, you can use just one.

Jesper Kjeldal (29:15):
Exactly, yeah. The same, if you concentrate three times, you reduce, actually we have some case stories where it was not only the financial side of it, but also the area where the processing side was located. People started to say, “Oh, there’s a lot of transportation. What is the carbon dioxide? What is the footprint from all those transports?” And then we reduced by very simple, you reduce the volume by two, so you increase the solace from 10 to 20, for example. Then you reduce the number of trucks from, I think it was from 20 to 10 per day, and already there the awareness of the consumer. Okay, now there’s less trucks with this dairy name on, so there’s also some green profile in that, apart from the financial advantage of it.

Mikkel Svold (29:59):
Yeah, I really like it when the sustainability metrics, they align with the financial metrics, because then we know that even when things are not going as well, we will still keep on, right? It’s just philanthropy. Those kinds of project will be closed down, right?

Jesper Kjeldal (30:19):
Yeah, exactly.

Mikkel Svold (30:20):
Our time is very nearly up, but I just want to just hear as the last thing. If you look into the future again, you attend the trade shows, you talk to people. When you look into the future, what kinds of movements do you see right now or trends coming along, or what do you expect to come in the dairy industry over the last say five, 10 years, something like that?

Jesper Kjeldal (30:46):
I think you have a growing population around the world because dairy is also export product.

Mikkel Svold (30:51):
And a growing middle-class, as you mentioned.

Jesper Kjeldal (30:53):
We also mentioned, so more and more people in the world want to eat, also very nice cheeses and so on. So I’m not too afraid about the dairy industry. I’m not as pessimistic as some might be because people need something to eat, and dairy products are very, very good products, but I think especially, well, you can see all the studies from that, but in larger cities with high-educated people, they say, “Ah, no, we cannot have all these cows and so on,” so what will happen, and it’s already happening also hybrid products because it seems the plant-based has had a little bit of hard start to be sold in the supermarket.

(31:34):
I heard the other day that it seems the shelf meter in the supermarket for plant-based are decreasing a little bit, so now it’s coming more and more hybrid products also where you combine dairy together with some plant, so you mix it together and make a hybrid product. You reduce the climate impact from the dairy industry a bit by using also plant-based products in a mix.

Mikkel Svold (31:54):
But you get both, the best from both worlds.

Jesper Kjeldal (31:56):
Yeah, you still keep some, the taste or mouth feel or consistency and so on, and then also as I said before, to produce in a fermenter the different proteins and so on, that doesn’t give you a cheese as such, but it gives you some of the components we are isolating in the milk and whey today you can produce in that tank instead, and then you just clean up by filtration, so I think it’ll go that way, but the dairy will stay there.

(32:26):
Just to make a quote on that, I made a guy from Asia years ago and he said, “I don’t get it. Why do you want to drink soy milk in Europe? I’ve grown up on soy milk, and now I finally can afford cow’s milk.” That was really eye-opener for me, there’s so many people still wanting the dairy products and more and more.

Mikkel Svold (32:45):
More and more can afford it, yeah. Jesper Kjeldal, thank you so much for this very interesting talk also down to a fairly nerdy level in membrane technology and separation technology. But we could have gone deeper, I can see you look at your notes, I know.

Jesper Kjeldal (33:01):
I would’ve liked to go, but yes.

Mikkel Svold (33:03):
But I think it was very knowledgeable and very nice for me to learn something more about that and also to have this little look into the future, I really like that, and I hope that the listeners out there, they liked it as well.

(33:18):
And to you, dear listeners, if you have any questions or have anything that you want to add, or if you have specific topics that you want us to talk about here on this podcast, please do reach out to us at podcast@au2mate.dk, and that’s automate spelled with a two, the number two so podcast@au2mate.dk, and we’ll have links in the descriptions. I think with that, the only thing I have left to say is thank you so much for the-

Jesper Kjeldal (33:45):
Thank you, pleasure.

Mikkel Svold (33:46):
Thank you.