As global food and beverage manufacturers face tightening water permits and regional water scarcity, Finnish deep tech company Collo has reached a new breakthrough in sensor physics that addresses a critical industrial bottleneck. By replacing 140-year-old measurement principles with their radio frequency (RF) measurement technology, Collo enables factories to decouple production growth from water consumption, allowing manufacturers to scale revenue while operating within existing environmental limits.
Recent data from a high-capacity beverage facility demonstrates that Collo’s liquid process technology revealed an optimisable potential of 23 minutes per cleaning cycle. Unlike a legacy electrical sensor that only measures conductivity, Collo’s analyser identifies the exact moment a line is clean.
For a standard manufacturing plant, the impact is measurable:
• 4 million litres of treated water can be saved annually (1,568 litres per cycle, 5,000 annual cycles).
• A 24% reduction in cleaning downtime was reached and reclaimed for production.
• Absolute decoupling: The ability to increase unit output while maintaining or reducing total water intake.
Many global beverage plants operate under strict water entitlements that legally cap their output. Because legacy sensors, relying on optics or conductivity, cannot see the molecular composition of liquids, factories are forced to use fixed-time cleaning cycles. To ensure hygiene, they over-rinse pipes during every cleaning cycle.
"We have to stop viewing water waste as just a sustainability metric when in reality, it’s a growth bottleneck," says Jani Puroranta, CEO of Collo. "When a plant flushes 24% of its cleaning water down the drain due to outdated sensing, it is flushing its potential to scale. Collo provides the real-time data needed to reclaim that capacity and turn it back into production time."
Collo’s technology achieves volumetric transparency by sending an electromagnetic field through the entire liquid flow. While the four legacy measurement principles have remained virtually unchanged since the 1880s, Collo’s radio frequency approach creates a completely new category of liquid intelligence to challenge industry giants. The technology is being used by market leaders like Coca-Cola, Danone, and Valio to flag product deviations and prevent quality failures before they exit the factory gate.
