SURFACE FINISHING FOR THE FOOD INDUSTRY

SETTING NEW STANDARDS WITH STREAM FINISHING AND ELECTRO FINISHING BY OTEC

Straubenhardt, November 24, 2025 – The food industry demands exceptional surface quality and process reliability. OTEC’s innovative Stream Finishing and Electro Finishing Technologies provide solutions that surpass traditional benchmarks for cleanliness, process dependability, and cost-efficiency.

Smooth, burr-free machine components are critical for manufacturing and packaging food products without contamination risks. Conventional production methods often result in rough surfaces and burrs, which can harbor residues and microorganisms. This not only compromises food safety but also increases cleaning efforts, downtime, and costs. Additionally, manual post-processing rarely achieves consistent quality and poses a higher risk of injury.

The Stream Finishing Process offers automated, highly precise, and ultra-clean surface finishing. Components are rotated and immersed in a medium containing grinding or polishing agents, resulting in extremely smooth, easy-to-clean surfaces with roughness values as low as Ra 0.01 μm—even for complex geometries or parts weighing up to 200 kg. Components treated with this method provide minimal opportunities for contamination or microbial growth, enhancing product safety and equipment availability.

Key benefits of these automated processes include easier cleaning of equipment components, reduced lubricant consumption, lower friction, and significantly extended service life. Production efficiency increases while waste and downtime are minimized, ensuring that surfaces of conveyor systems, dosing, packaging, and sealing equipment meet the highest cleanliness standards.

For the most demanding applications, particularly in hard-to-reach or finely structured areas, the Electro Finishing Process is an ideal complement. This method uses electrolytic material removal to achieve mirror-smooth, metallically pure, and completely burr-free surfaces. A significant advantage of Electro Finishing is its ability to create biocompatible surfaces, which is especially important for food and pharmaceutical applications, ensuring the safety and compatibility of treated components. Even intricate and complex geometries are optimally processed, significantly improving cleanability and resistance to contamination.