Meat+Poultry - July 2017 - 15

ENGINEERING CAREER PLANS
"I was always fascinated with chemistry,"
recalls Kafer, thinking back to his childhood
where he grew up north of New York City, in
Westchester County. Just before graduating
from high school and after he scored a 100
on the state Regents test, Kafer's guidance
counselor said: "You probably should look at
chemical engineering," which was sage advice.
He applied to and was admitted to Clarkson
College of Technology in far upstate New York.
Committing to the college, now known as
Clarkson Univ., without the benefit of even a
visit to the campus was a leap of faith.
"I wanted to get into manufacturing," he
says, and took some business-related courses
that included accounting and economics. "I
also had a passion for food," he says and when
he wasn't enrolled in school he spent many
hours working in a variety of restaurants as a
cook back in his hometown.
Growing up near the headquarters of
General Foods, Kafer took a flyer and sent a
resume to the company's nearby R&D center
in Tarrytown, New York, where engineers
for some of its plants were being hired.
Kafer got an interview during his senior year
and received a job offer at the company's
giant coffee-roasting facility in Hoboken,
New Jersey, in the shadows of the steaming
Maxwell House Coffee sign that marked the
skyline there for decades. After graduating
from Clarkson with a bachelor's degree in
chemical engineering, Kafer eagerly started his
first job there. Working as a process engineer,
beginning in the late 1970s, Kafer learned
plenty in those first few years.
"It was probably one of the toughest plants
to work in; it was an old plant; it was the highcost plant in the division; it was right on the
Hudson across from New York City," he says.
He remembers well his first assignment as
a wet-behind-the-ears engineering graduate:
figure out the pollution control system on the
plant's roasters, which came during an era
when the Environmental Protection Agency
was rolling out a steady stream of new airquality regulations. With a recently purchased
air scrubbing unit not solving the pollution
problem as hoped, Kafer was challenged
to control the smoky exhaust generated by
roasting coffee beans, ideally to use it as
combustion air for the old plant's boilers

without allowing it to back up into the plant,
making it impractical for workers to perform
their duties. The heavily unionized plant now
was faced with devising an amicable solution
for a problem that had divided workers in the
plant's roasting operations vs. those in the
boiler operations.
"So here I am, a 22-year-old engineer with
these guys who'd been working in the plant for
40 years," Kafer says, "With the boiler guys on
one side of a table and the roaster guys on the
other side. They're looking at me going 'what
are you possibly going to tell us?'" he says.
His only commitment to them was, "I promise
you we'll figure it out; I can't tell you anything
other than that," he nervously assured the
skeptical group.
And with that, Kafer frantically monitored
and measured everything he could in all parts
of the plant. He immersed himself in learning
about the intricacies of boiler operations,
interviewing the boiler operators about
their challenges and daily duties as well as
spending months on the processing floor with
the roaster operators. He was there when the
system worked perfectly and he was there
when the choking smoke backed up in the
plant. He took countless readings to measure
air-flow, static pressures, installed strategically
placed dampers until he finally determined
there was a correlation between steam needed
and the presence of combustion air. He created
a chart to balance the level of steam with the
amount of roasters utilized and at what point
more steam would be created and need to be
released into the atmosphere, which would
result in an energy penalty for the plant, a
concession that would be the decision of the
plant manager.
Meeting that first challenge taught Kafer
a lesson he still remembers and practices
today: "You really have to invest yourself if you
want to solve a problem, which means getting
the right data; get all the facts; take all the
measurements. Yes, it takes time but that's how
you achieve success."
This successful solution lit the next fuse
for Kafer as he recognized an opportunity to
automate the roasting process at the plant by
assessing the thermodynamics of beans as they
roasted. Kafer realized that at a certain point
during the roasting process, coffee beans give
off (exothermic) heat, which explained why

"Engineering
is more about
testing and
experimenting
than debating
about what
will and won't
work."

www.meatpoultry.com | 07.17 | MEAT+ POULTRY

http://www.meatpoultry.com

Meat+Poultry - July 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Meat+Poultry - July 2017