Turning up the heat
When Peter Vyncke, owner of Vyncke Clean Energy Technology, and Johannes Wick, CEO Grains & Food at Bühler announced a strategic partnership between Vyncke and Bühler in March 2021 to offer low-carbon-emission food plants, it wasn’t a big surprise in the global food and feed industry. The dedicated Vynckeneers – the nickname of the family-owned company’s close to 400 employees – and Bühler’s engineers have been collaborating on a host of projects for customers across the globe for decades. From City Group in Bangladesh to Malteria Oriental in Uruguay to Olam plants in Singapore and the Netherlands to name but a few; wherever Vyncke and Bühler join forces, the customer and the environment benefit.
Thinking outside the box to find new ways to convert biomass and industrial waste into clean energy is in every Vynckeneer’s DNA. Founded in 1912 by Louis and Flavie Vyncke as a blacksmith company, Vyncke started making steam boilers in the 1920s as the flax industry began to flourish in Flanders. Thermal energy was in high demand to remove the flax fibers from their stalks, and with soaring coal prices, Vyncke entered the biomass market with their technology to burn flax straw waste in boilers to generate affordable energy.
“Our founders saw a great opportunity to support growing local industry and do good at the same time. We have been driven by that very principle ever since, long before terms like global warming and Kyoto were added to our vocabulary,” says Peter Vyncke.
Today, his company enables its customers to reduce their CO₂ emissions by 3 million tons annually with their solutions for food and agriculture, wood, and recovered fuels. The partnership with Bühler will primarily focus on food and feed customers.
