Modern Process Equipment designs and builds roller-style Granulizers. The Chicago company was founded in 1957 and, at that time, served exclusively the coffee industry.
“We now have customers in 51 countries,” says Brian Thomas, controls engineer at MPE. “Research, development and production engineering responsibilities are shared on a project basis. All of our grinders are designed and built in Chicago. Since 1985, we’ve expanded our product line. Our Granulizers are used in the coffee, food, chemical, mineral and pharmaceutical industries. From a controls standpoint, the first four industries have very similar needs. In the pharmaceutical industry, however, we also work to minimize the complexity of the controls and reduce the available operator adjustments to streamline the FAT/IQ/OQ requirements.”
MPE’s grinders reduce friable materials in size by fracturing them between pairs of precisely corrugated and aligned rollers. “Each Granulizer is custom-tailored to provide the highest possible yield of good product and to reduce unwanted dust, or ‘fines,’” says Thomas. “We’ve increased our global marketing efforts in response to the increasing financial attractiveness of U.S. equipment due to the weak U.S. dollar, and sales to foreign customers now make up about 20% of our business. We are also the world leader in Turkish, or ultrafine, coffee grinding, soluble coffee grinding and several other areas; this helps drive our foreign sales, as well.”