В Симкоме двухкомандная бригада обслуживает крупнейший в Канаде завод по производству кокоса

On certain days in Simcoe, Ont., you don’t need a map to find Klassic Coconut’s factory — you just follow your nose. When the factory is toasting, the thick scent of coconut can be smelled for miles. Phil Genery, one of the plant’s two-person maintenance team, laughs about it. “My fiancé’s grandma, she lives all the way on the other end of town,” he says. “She can even smell the toasting line over there.” That toasting line — a custom-engineered, gas-fired, two-stage band oven capable of processing 4,000 to 5,000 pounds of coconut per hour — is both the crown jewel and one of the most demanding pieces of equipment at Klassic Coconut’s 50,000-square-foot facility. It’s also a lesson in how different maintenance looks when your raw material is coconut. During a recent visit by MRO, Duncan Stewart, who oversees operations at Klassic Coconut, and Genery walked through their operations and the maintenance program that keeps it running with minimal downtime. A lean dream team Founded in 1986 by Henk Van Amerongen Sr. under the name Van Amerongen & Son Inc., Klassic Coconut is a family-owned and operated business and one of the largest importers of desiccated coconut in Canada. It manufactures sweetened and toasted coconut products for customers across North America, with some product moving to the Middle East, Brazil and Ecuador. The current Simcoe facility was essentially a shell when the company acquired it. It was a gut job that kept only the steel structure with a new roof, floors, walls and a production layout designed by the team in-house. The company is now planning an additional 52,000 square feet on the same site. Running maintenance across all of it: Tim Zandstra, the facility’s lead maintenance technician with 11 years on the job, and Genery, who has been with the company for seven years across multiple roles before landing in maintenance about four or five years ago. It’s a lean team, but it works. “It’s a pretty robust preventative maintenance program that’s run very well,” says Stewart. The plant runs Monday through Thursday, with the Friday-to-Sunday window reserved for Zandstra and Genery to work through a structured schedule of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual tasks. Every production day starts with morning checks: sanitizer and soap dispenser concentrations measured at each numbered sink, belt tracking verified on every running conveyor, forklift inspections covering hydraulics, brakes, horns and warning systems. Weekly tasks include roof checks of all AMUs and HVAC filters, battery top-ups on the three lead-acid forklift batteries and a check of the sugar silo magnet, which screens for any metal fragments that may have come loose from the grinder. Once a month, the team conducts a full glass and plastic audit of the entire facility, checking every light bulb, switch cover and transparent guard for cracks. The approach is deliberately manual and low-tech. The team briefly tried a software program for tracking, but Stewart says it was less intuitive and more cumbersome than their binder system. “Our downtime is incredibly minimal,” says Stewart. “There are situations that are unforeseen that you can’t plan for, but since we moved to this facility, our downtime for maintenance-related issues is negligible. Properly documenting and scheduling maintenance has paid dividends.” The unique challenge of oil Desiccated coconut is 65 per cent fat. When containers arrive cold from Vancouver in winter, that fat has solidified, causing the product to clump and become difficult to process. Before production can begin, incoming shipments have to be moved into tempering rooms and brought up to 82 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit to bring the product back to a workable state. The oil creates a separate challenge at the other end of the process. During production and cleanup, coconut oil makes its way into the facility’s drainage system. The plant was designed with production drains on a separate system, feeding through an oil interceptor to keep coconut oil out of the municipal sewer. In warm months, that works seamlessly. In winter, the oil pooling in the interceptor can solidify entirely. “We’ve had a couple of times when Tim and I have been called in in the morning,” Genery says. “We go in there and there’s a giant hunk of solid coconut oil in the separator tank.” Monitoring that interceptor through the colder months is now a standing maintenance item. Oil also requires careful management when it comes to lubricants. Because this is a food plant, every lubricant used on equipment must be food grade; not something that can be sourced locally in a pinch. The team tracks chemical inventory monthly, monitoring usage closely to make sure they’re never caught short before a PM. “If we don’t have certain oils, then next thing you know, you’ve drained something out and now you can’t use it for a month because it’s on backorder,” Genery says. Oh, sugar Despite these challenges, oil isn’t Klassic Coconut’s dominant maintenance issue: it’s sugar. Klassic Coconut mills granulated sugar on site and grinds it into icing sugar, which behaves less like a food ingredient and more like a fine-grit abrasive. “It’s like a micro-sanding to everything,” Genery says. Belts, pins, plastic components all wear faster than they would in a typical manufacturing environment. “Powdered sugar is very abrasive. It likes to wear on plastic,” says Zandstra, who explains that some belts in the facility have lasted 11 years, while others needed replacement after three or four. One machine runs with a Teflon coating on its upper surface to maintain slip and that coating must be stripped and reapplied every two years because the sugar contact wears it away. Sugar also has a humidity problem. If moisture gets into the sugar system, the product clumps and stops flowing. So the plant runs a dehumidifier and the team checks humidity levels weekly, a non-negotiable on the maintenance schedule. High heat, high stakes Of all the equipment in the facility, Stewart says the toasting line (or “oven dryer”) demands the most care. The line uses a custom-engineered band oven, designed on the same principle as equipment used in the Philippines to produce desiccated coconut, but specifically built for Klassic Coconut’s toasting process. It runs at 380 degrees Fahrenheit (193 Celsius) and requires a licensed gas fitter to inspect the entire gas system annually. The line also has a ventilation requirement. The toasting process generates exhaust that, without proper ventilation, can deplete the oxygen in the production room and create a negative atmosphere. To prevent that, the oven is interlocked with a makeup air unit (AMU)—the oven will not run unless the AMU is confirmed to be operating. Genery checks the AMU and all HVAC systems weekly, year-round, roof access in January included. “That’s why we check them on a weekly basis,” Genery says of the ventilation systems. “If anything happens, that toasting line instantly shuts down, we check it and figure it out.” The rest of the toasting line PM is belt- and bearing-heavy: checking gear mesh, inspecting for tears or wear, monitoring gearbox fluid levels through drain-plug checks and keeping track of chains and motors in the tumbler system. “For the most part, it comes down to making sure that all the bearings are greased up and that all the belts aren’t going to, you know, explode on us,” says Genery. The company also makes coconut butter line presents its own maintenance discipline. To make coconut butter, desiccated or toasted coconut is fed into a high-speed grinder that pulverizes it into a liquid, a process that takes roughly 30 to 45 seconds for a 20-litre pail. The grinder runs at 14,000 RPM and is belt-driven, with four interlocks preventing operation unless all guards are in place. “There’s oil that needs to be running in that consistently, and it has to be running half an hour before we actually start it up because of how fast it runs. It can’t run dry at all,” explains Genery. The smell of success All of those challenges exist on top of the baseline demands facing any food and beverage processing facility: stringent food safety standards, food-grade lubricant requirements and a full glass and plastic walkthrough every four weeks to account for anything cracked or broken anywhere in the building. Then there’s the supply chain. “Coconut itself is pretty volatile,” Stewart says, noting that coconut is grown in the Philippines and Indonesia, regions prone to typhoons, volcanic activity, and weather cycles that can make supply scarce. But walking through the spotless facility, you’d never know. For a two-person team managing a toasting line, a sugar milling system, a coconut butter line, tumblers, forklifts, and HVAC, the operation runs with quiet precision. And when the breeze carries that warm, sweet smell across the town of Simcoe, it’s proof that everything is running as it should. This article was originally published in the Spring 2026 issue of MRO.