Eevia Health Plc, (”Eevia” or ”The Company”), has installed new capacities and automation equipment for processing and evaporation of natural plant extract liquids. As of August 1^st, the newly installed machines and technologies are working satisfactorily, with improved yield, productivity, and cost efficiency.

One investment is related to improved berry processing, included a new loading system and new thawing equipment, which reduces the batch loading and thawing time from six hours to one hour, with only half the personnel needed for same operation. Such improvements are useful, to drive the overall process time down, hence increasing output per time unit.

A second investment is a new evaporator for the evaporation of extract liquids and regeneration of organic solvents. Anew evaporator has been installed during May-June and tit has over 500% higher capacity per hour, than the old evaporator, which has been decommissioned. The functionality of the evaporation process has also been improved with the installation of a new active cooler, which serves the company’s general glycol cooling system. The new active cooler supplements a three-year-old passive (air) cooler, and ensures constant glycol temperature of 4 celcius all year around. This eliminates the impact of hot weather in the summer and stabilizes several processes during summer month. Before the new cooler was commissioned this summer, the new evaporator and other equipment were only able to evaporate at 40% capacity in the hottest days of June-July. After the comissioning, full capacity utilization was achieved.

In the extraction area, a new automated separator (disk stack centrifuge) has been installed and is fully integrated with the decanter, another important liquid-solid separation equipment in our green chemistry plant. The new separator will significantly speed up all clarification of extract liquids down to 1 micron and will ensure purity before downstream processing. It is a very advanced machine, with automatic regulation of several quality parameters (turbidity, etc) and a capacity 400% higher than the previous manually operated separator.

Of the increase in capacity from the new evaporator, we will be able to utilize an increase of  approximately 300%. The full utilization of the increase in evaporation capacity will be  possible after an increase in chromatography capacity, which is planned for Q4-21. The chromatography columns are used for purification of bioactive plant extracts and the increase in this process is part of the second step of the current investment program.

Other improvements and investments have also been implemented during Q2-21, including a new ERP (Enterprise Resource System), new automation software and various new packaging equipment. Some of the installations, especially the installation and commissioning of the evaporator, took longer time than planned and affected productivity in Q2-21 negatively, especially in May. However, lost capacity from these delays, is expected to be recovered in Q3-21.

The second phase of the capacity investments will take place during Q3-21 and will include introducing additional capacity for key processes, including secondary machines in some processes creating “redundancies”, which may reduce the vulnerability of individual machine break-downs or stoppage time during maintenance.

Both the first and second part of the capacity investments are fundamentally important in enabling Eevia Health Oyj to serve the large sales agreements, which have been reported earlier.  Hence, the investments are in line with the company business plan of strong growth and strategic positioning in global nutraceutical markets.

For further information, please contact:

Stein Ulve, CEO, Eevia Health Plc                           Kim Nurmi-Aro, CFO, Eevia Health Plc

Email: stein.ulve@eeviahealth.com                      kim@eeviahealth.com

Telephone: +358 400 22 5967                                +358 504 44 0717

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