BRANDS

SCHUGI

The Schugi company was acquired by the Hosokawa Group in 1992. Schugi is an abbreviation of the two names of the founders: Mr. Schuurmans and Mr. Van Ginneken. They started their business in 1925 and were mainly merchants in sugar, coffee, tea, molasses and other tropical produce.

In the early fifties their core business was the distribution of cane and beet sugar molasses, mainly for the animal feed industry. As molasses is a liquid which is difficult to incorporate because of its high viscosity, it was decided to develop a machine capable of incorporating molasses into all kinds of compound feed. This resulted in a machine which was able to incorporate unheated molasses very homogeneously into a powdered compound feed.

Schugi

Because the newly developed machine was a continuous machine, Schugi realized that it was very important to accurately and constantly proportion both compound feed and molasses in order to be able to guarantee a constant finished product. Not all equipment readily available on the market met these requirements and for that reason Schugi developed its own proportioning systems for molasses and compound feed. This also implied electrical consequences and so Schugi came to designing and supplying complete systems. The continuous mixer was patented in several countries and got the brand name "Schugi". More than a thousand of these systems have been sold into the animal feed industry, mainly in Europe.

The origin of the Schugi Flexomix

In 1967 Schugi came in contact with the German steel industry, which wanted to humidify its millions of tons of basic slag. During the tests with this product it became clear that the Schugi mixer was capable to transform the very fine powder into micro-granules in one step. The fresh product however, was extremely sticky and plugged the original all steel Schugi mixer. To solve this problem, Schugi needed to redesign the existing molasses mixer to a mixing/agglomerating unit with a self-cleaning device, which Schugi created around 1972. This unit was called the Schugi Flexomix.

Schugi Flexomix

This unit was capable of incorporating more liquids into powders, producing an agglomerated product. However, these granules were of a sticky nature because they contained quite some liquid. Therefore they had to be dried first before they could be handled properly. A fluid-bed dryer is extremely suitable to dry the agglomerates coming from a Schugi Flexomix unit. For this reason Schugi also designed and developed our own fluid-bed dryer around 1972.

From that moment onwards Schugi were capable of supplying complete agglomerating systems to the chemical and food industry, where lots of powdery products are being processed. These powdery products have a number of properties which make handling difficult: they are dusty, they have bad flow properties once they are mixed, they easily tend to demix during further handling, they are difficult to be wetted with liquids and tend to flood on their surfaces.

As the technical department of Schuurmans & Van Ginneken developed itself steadily into process engineering, it was decided in 1973 to turn it into an independent company for which the name "Schugi B.V." was chosen, so the same name as the brand name of the molasses incorporating unit.

When the owner of Schugi decided to retire in 1987, the company was acquired by the American company Bepex Corporation which in its turn was owned by the Berwind Group. After four years Berwind decided to sell the entire Bepex Corporation, so including Schugi B.V., to the Japanese company Hosokawa. So, since February 1st, 1992 Schugi is part of this Japanese company.

In 2000 Schugi merged into Hosokawa Micron B.V. and relocated to Doetinchem.

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