Electrifying Industrial Heat in Petfood and Fishfeed Production
How Netherlands-based Geelen Counterflow created a technology that electrifies the energy-intensive drying process required to make pet kibble and fish feed.
Pet ownership is growing globally – and that means the pet food market is booming too. In 2025, the market reached $140 billion. Over two thirds of this pet food is the small, dried pellets known as kibble.
All this pet food comes with a price: It’s traditionally manufactured in a way that depends on fossil gas. The same process is used in producing other types of animal feed, including the aquafeed used in commercial fish farming.
“Industrial dryers are very big consumers of gas and in our industry an average dryer consumes the same amount of gas as anywhere between 500 and 1,000 family homes,” said Sander Geelen, CEO of Dutch dryer and cooler manufacturer Geelen Counterflow.
To tackle this problem, Geelen Counterflow has created an electric industrial dryer. This unique dryer helped one aquafeed plant become the world’s first zero-emissions fish feed factory and cut energy usage and running costs by 75%, while protecting the facility from volatile fossil fuel markets. At the same time, the innovation has significantly slashed water use and solved odor problems.
How to electrify the drying of pet food and fish feed
Geelen Counterflow was founded in 1980 by the current CEO’s uncle, Pierre Geelen. He invented the counterflow cooler for animal feed – a highly efficient machine that drops the temperature of hot, freshly made compound feed pellets by forcing cool air in the opposite direction of their flow.
Sander Geelen took over the company in the late 1990s, but it was in 2010 that he made the move toward electrification of dryers.
When he took his young family on a sailing trip to the Virgin Islands to show them the vibrant coral reefs he had seen 20 years before, he discovered that they had died due to climate change and pollution. He decided to make it his company’s mission to create completely sustainable dryers.
And to do that, he needed to decouple dryers from fossil gas.
Inventing an electric industrial dryer
Gas has traditionally been used to power the industrial dryers in pet food and fish feed factories. It offers consistent thermal energy to quickly evaporate moisture, a process that comes toward the end of production.
Geelen set out to invent an electric industrial dryer that runs on a heat pump rather than a gas boiler. His team spent eight years developing it at the company factory in the village of Haelen in the south-east of the Netherlands. They quickly decided that heat pumps could efficiently replace the gas burners.
“Usually, the high humidity, warm air that comes out of a dryer is dumped into the atmosphere, which you can see in all the white plumes above factories,” Geelen said. “That air contains nearly all of the energy that has been injected by the gas burner.”
With a heat pump, though, manufacturers can catch that air and then condense it, recovering the energy that was put into it in the first place. The only electricity used is to raise the temperature of that heat, which is around 40 degrees Celsius and too low for a dryer.
The problem was the heat exchanger, which is used to condense the waste heat so it can be re-used. As the air that came out of the dryer contained particles of the dried food and feed products, it quickly blocked a standard heat exchanger. Consequently, Geelen and his team developed a self-cleaning exchanger that washes itself with condensation it generates.
Once all the components were developed, Geelen and his team tested a pilot line version of the electric dryer in Poland, at a factory owned by U.S. food multinational Mars, Inc. It performed identically to a gas-powered dryer, with its temperature and drying time both the same.
It was time to start selling the new dryer to customers.
The world’s first zero-emission fish feed factory
In 2022, Geelen Counterflow installed its first full-sized electric dryer, replacing an old gas burner in the Cargill-Ewos aquafeed plant in Bergneset, Norway, making it the world’s first zero-emission fish feed factory.
A specialist in feed for local salmon farms, the plant has since enjoyed a cut in energy use of 75%. In Norway, this translates into a 75% running cost saving too, because the price of gas and electricity in the country is roughly the same per kilowatt hour. As the heat pump runs on renewable electricity, it eliminated the old gas burner’s carbon dioxide emissions, which had previously been 3,000 tons per year.
The electric dryer also reduced water use: The heat pump’s condensation process turns the moisture in the air into water, which is then recirculated through the process and reused. Like the recycling of heat, it’s an almost circular process.
The electric dryer cuts odor issues, too. Usually, pet and fish food factories need to be located far from towns and cities because the raw materials used in their products create an unpleasant smell when they’re heated. Otherwise, factory owners must install expensive treatment systems that clean up the air. But with an electric dryer, much of the odor is caught in the condensed water.
The growing business case for electrification
Geelen says that one of the best things any government can do to help scale the electrification of such industrial processes is to implement policies that even out the cost of electricity and fossil fuels.
At present, he and his team are targeting their sales of electric dryers in countries where the spark ratio — or the comparison between electricity and gas prices — makes them financially viable. Since its inaugural electric dryer in Norway, Geelen Counterflow has installed similar dryers in China, South Korea and Thailand.
Though the cost ratio still doesn’t work in some markets, several factors have made electrification more attractive in recent years.
“In the last ten years, two things have changed, said Geelen. “Renewable electricity has become cheaper and energy independence has become more important geopolitically. So now there are three arguments for electrification: sustainability, cost savings and reducing dependence on fossil fuels.”
While the conventional thinking is that industrial processes are hard to electrify, that’s not necessarily the case. Indeed, Geelen is certainly optimistic that change is afoot.
Said Geelen, “There are some industrial processes that are maybe difficult to electrify, but there’s more and more evidence that almost anything can be electrified.”