Instant Noodle Manufacturing Wastewater Treatment: Frying Oil, Starch Slurry and CIP Loads
An instant noodle plant mixes dough, steams and cuts it, fries the noodles in palm oil, and packs them with seasoning. The water circuit collects starch from the mixer and cutter rooms, palm oil from the fryer area, seasoning dust from the packing floor, and a hot clean-in-place load from everything else. Each of these behaves differently in treatment, and the design that works separates them early. Frying oil floats. Starch settles, swells and then sours. Seasoning dissolves and carries colour and salt. A plant that sends all three down one pipe has mixed a problem that no single piece of equipment solves.
Four Streams, Four Behaviours
Fryer and fryer-area wash water carries palm oil, free and emulsified. The free fraction floats and is intercepted easily; the emulsified fraction, stabilised by detergent, needs chemical help.
Dough and cutting room water carries starch. Fresh starch settles well; stale starch ferments, turns acidic and grabs onto everything, which is why this stream is collected and treated promptly rather than stored.
Seasoning and soup-base spills bring salt, colour and flavour compounds. Their volume is small and their effect on the treatment plant is outsized, mostly through salt and colour.
Clean-in-place water from mixers, steamers and fryers arrives hot and soapy in slugs. It is the stream that sets the peak, and the equalisation tank is sized against it.
Oil Interception First
Covered grease traps and coalescing plate separators on the fryer-area drains catch the free oil before it goes anywhere. Skimmed palm oil is collected, and where the volume justifies it, rendered and sold.
Emulsified oil passes these interceptors and is handled at the head of the treatment plant by coagulation and dissolved-air flotation, which recovers most of what remains.
The failure mode is well known: fryer drains that bypass the interceptor during cleaning. Housekeeping decides whether the flotation unit sees an oil load it was sized for or one it was not. For the reuse angle specifically, Coal Gasification and Syngas Plant effluent goes further than we can here.
Starch removal is a settling job, and it works best when the stream is fresh. Settling tanks or hydrocyclones on the dough-room drain take out most of the starch as a sludge that has some value as animal feed.
The operational trap is storage. Starch slurry held overnight in a warm sump ferments, drops pH and releases odour, and the treatment plant then inherits both the load and the smell.
Measured Results from Plants We Built
We commissioned a 60 m³/day plant for this duty in Foshan, Guangdong back in 2021. Feed COD came in around 2,000 mg/L and left at 90 mg/L — 95.5% removal.
A second unit of the same class, delivered in Hong'an, Hubei during 2021, ran 150 m³/day at 1,961 mg/L feed COD down to 200 mg/L.
| Location | Year | Flow | Feed COD | Treated COD | Removal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foshan, Guangdong | 2021 | 60 m³/d | 2,000 mg/L | 90 mg/L | 95.5% |
| Hong'an, Hubei | 2021 | 150 m³/d | 1,961 mg/L | 200 mg/L | 89.8% |
Figures are site-measured values from commissioned plants, not modelled estimates.
Where the plant runs a biological stage, a portion of fine starch is actually helpful, feeding the biomass. The design target is to remove the bulk mechanically and leave the fine fraction for biology.
Biology and Peaks
After oil interception and starch settling, the combined stream is a moderate food effluent, and conventional anaerobic-aerobic treatment handles it. The salt from seasoning limits anaerobic performance in some plants, and that limit is checked with the salt balance before the reactor is bought.
Equalisation is doing more work here than in most food plants, because the CIP slugs and the shift pattern create the peaks, not the average flow.
Foam from detergent carryover appears in the aeration basin in bursts. A defoamer line and a scum baffle are the standard answers, and neither is expensive. Much of this mirrors the situation set out in Waste Oil Re-refining Plant Wastewater Treatment.
Operating Notes
Enforce the grease interceptor. The one skip of fryer sludge that goes down the wrong drain undoes a week of good flotation performance.
Do not store starch water. Treat it fresh or feed it fresh to biology, and the odour question answers itself.
Track the salt from seasoning spills. It is invisible in daily operation and decisive in the biological design.
Combining Treatment Stages
If your site also runs this kind of duty, Polyolefin Production Wastewater Treatment covers the cost side of the decision in more depth. Most facilities do not run a single clean stream, and a shared equalisation and biological stage is usually the economical answer once the streams are chemically compatible.
Why Choose Baihuipu as Your Manufacturer
Two decades in this industry teaches you that most treatment problems are procurement problems in disguise. Someone bought the cheapest skid, nobody checked the equalisation volume, and eighteen months on the plant cannot hold its consent limit. We build differently.
In-House Fabrication
Our Guangdong works produces everything from standard modular units to fully bespoke lines. Building in-house keeps cost, schedule and quality under our own control rather than a subcontractor's goodwill.
Certification and Export Practice
CE marking is standard and we work to ISO 9001 procedures. Where a project calls for specific material grades, pressure vessel certification or ATEX-rated equipment, we build to that standard and ship the full documentation pack.
Documentation You Can Actually Audit
Each system ships with as-built drawings, material certificates, welding records and a functional specification. If a client's own consultant wants to review the process calculation basis, we hand it over rather than treating it as proprietary.
20+ Years Across Dozens of Industries
Experience matters most when your waste stream behaves nothing like the textbook example. We have dealt with toxic organics, heavy metals, extreme salinity and refractory COD in food processing, chemical manufacturing, electroplating, mining and municipal projects.
Twenty-Plus Export Markets
We have shipped to the United States, Canada, Russia, Indonesia, India, Nigeria and Vietnam among others. Crating, export documentation and certificates are handled in-house, which keeps customs surprises to a minimum.
Complete System Responsibility
One supplier, one process guarantee. We take the plant from preliminary screening through to membrane separation, evaporation and brine management, with process, mechanical, electrical and controls engineering handled internally.
After the Handover
Spares for everything we install are held in stock. Remote telemetry is available on most systems, and our service engineers commission, train your operators and turn out for emergencies.
Getting Started
Send us a water analysis and your production profile and we will tell you honestly what the process should look like and roughly what it costs to build and run. Reach our engineering team on WhatsApp: +86 13631765076 or via hkbhp.com.
WhatsApp: +86 13631765076
Frequently Asked Questions
What treatment capacity do you normally design for instant noodle manufacturing?
Skid-mounted units cover roughly 44 to 483 m³/day depending on the duty, and parallel trains extend that further. We size against your actual peak hour flow rather than the daily average, because equalisation rarely absorbs the whole spike.
What spare parts should we hold on site?
Critical spares are pumps, dosing valves, instrumentation sensors and any specialty media. We ship a recommended spares kit with the plant and hold stock for everything we supply, so lead times on replacements stay short.
Is instant noodle manufacturing treatment suitable for water reuse?
Usually yes, once the oil interception first stage is stable. Reuse normally means adding membrane polishing to bring conductivity and COD down to your process water specification. We would need to see your reuse water limits to size it properly.
Do you handle installation and operator training?
Every unit we supply is commissioned by our own engineers. Training happens on site with your actual operators, and the O&M manual covers routine work plus troubleshooting. Remote diagnostics through the control system are included for the first year.
