49 Well built When we designed our new company building in Diepholz in 2001 we gave careful consideration to our needs At that time we had 56 employees We had no idea back then that they would be joined by 100 more people with in ten years But since we knew from past experience how quickly buildings could become too small we built with foresight Namely we built in such a way that certain building sections could easily be expanded should that ever become necessary We wouldn t exactly call our company headquarters a Lego house but that s one way to picture the alteration we undertook in 2009 when we added a new hall for tea production Remove rear wall add on hall job done We fol lowed the same procedure in 2015 when we expanded our raw materials warehouse by 1 815 pallet slots thus doubling its floor space Back in 2001 we wanted our new building to be as energetically sustaina ble as possible We don t mean to brag but our insulation was already so far ahead of the times that it could easily meet today s insulation standards without any modernisation Wherever possible we use renewable materi als in all of our construction projects Our huge wooden roof beams are an impressive example of this Both building alterations were good opportunities to integrate clever new technologies In 2009 we installed a geothermal energy system and in 2015 we added a photovoltaic system that would simply have been too heavy for the old hall But there were other reasons to modify our buildings besides the need for more space In 2016 we had to modernise our blending room For many years it was just a section of our raw materials warehouse The blending room is where spices and teas are blended as the name suggests Heavy hopper cars trans port ingredients like garlic paprika etc to the blending room and from there to the finishing department Since we didn t want the tea and spice dusts generated during blending to end up in our warehouse we separated the two areas by a wall This was not a bad idea But steadi ly increasing blending times led to much more dust Moreover when the blending machines are in operation they add extra heat to the room Al though the ceiling is nine metres high the blend ing room is relatively small because of the wall This work climate was not very nice for our em ployees especially during humid months nor was it favourable for blending our teas and spic es as some of the ingredients started to clump The solution A highly efficient ventilation sys tem now keeps our blending room well ventilat ed and cool In 2018 we installed new flooring The constant ly rolling hopper cars and other transport devic es made this necessary as the old flooring wasn t made to withstand such heavy wear And the new flooring dampens the sound of the wheels too

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