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Bauer opens new production and innovation facility
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Monday, 27 July, 2026, 13 : 00 PM [IST]
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Germany
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On July 16, 2026, the private dairy Bauer inaugurated its new production and innovation facility in Wasserburg am Inn, Germany, with Bavarian Minister of Agriculture Michaela Kaniber also in attendance. The event brought into view a project the company has been working on for around a year and a half: The engineering group supplied and implemented the complete process technology for producing plant base, from raw material intake to the finished concentrate it will use as the basis for its plant-based products going forward. Regular production starts in August 2026.
For GEA, it's the first project of this scale: The group accompanied the entire journey, from the initial idea through process development to the operational plant, as a single-source provider. It has been making plant-based yogurt alternatives for some time already, but until now sourced the soy base for them externally. With the new facility, the dairy brings this upstream production step in-house – a move that shows how dairies approach their plant-based raw material line: not as something bought in, but as in-house industrial expertise they build up themselves, it supplied the process engineering foundation that move required.
The company took on every process step itself for this project: receiving and storing raw soybeans, mixing and grinding, solids separation via decanter, thermal inactivation using heating technology, tank storage, water treatment, and the associated CIP cleaning systems. At the end of the line is a plant-based concentrate, which further processes into yogurt alternatives at its existing facilities. That fermentation and filling plant itself is not part of its scope. It also supported the project from the very first feasibility tests onward and assisted with building planning made possible by a long-standing relationship of trust between the two companies.
The project could only be implemented so quickly because it minimised the number of interfaces: The company acted as general contractor and brought together several teams of experts, including dairy processing experts from Munich and from the process test centres in Ahaus and Oelde – under a single project lead. It awarded the contract in May 2025, installation began in January 2026, and the first batch already follows in August 2026. It developed and validated its initial process concepts and performance data beforehand in precisely these test centres – the same approach the group has already applied on comparable projects for dairies and beverage producers across Europe and overseas.
Michael Klamt, GEA project manager, said, “Projects like this demonstrate why we view plant-based as a strategic growth area for GEA. The fact that we were able to support Bauer as a single-source partner from the initial feasibility study all the way to a fully operational plant was essential to reliably meeting such an ambitious timeline. And it proves that our investments in the test centres in Ahaus and Oelde pay off.”
From Bauer’s perspective, the initial assessment is positive, according to the company. “Because GEA brought together testing, process design, engineering, and implementation under one roof, our project was able to move full steam ahead. We had a single point of contact for the entire process chain – that saved us time in every phase of the project without having to compromise on quality,” said Sebastian Bodmeier, technical project manager at the private dairy Bauer.
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