Which products receive the CleanSmoke seal?
With CleanSmoke, food can be smoked more sustainably, more environmentally friendly, more resource-efficient, and free of harmful additives such as ash, tar and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). To ensure that consumers can benefit from CleanSmoke products in the future, the CleanSmoke Coalition has developed the CleanSmoke seal for sustainable and harmless products.
CleanSmoke
What is CleanSmoke?
CleanSmoke is the sustainable alternative to conventional smoking in every respect. The smoke is cleaned before it comes in contact with the food and is therefore free from harmful additives such as ash, tar and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). In this innovative smoking process, all parameters such as time, temperature, humidity and circulating air speed meet the conditions of conventional smoking processes. That is how CleanSmoke fully preserves such important characteristics as taste, colour or preservation.
How is CleanSmoke generated?
No trees need to be chopped for CleanSmoke: Untreated sawdust from wood processing smoulders under controlled conditions. The resulting smoke is condensed with drinking water and then filtered in a multi-stage process, whereby it is purified from ash, tar and carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). What remains is pure smoke condensate trapped in drinking water. For smoking food, the smoke condensate is freshly produced in a so-called smoke generator with the aid of compressed air to generate stable smoke.
Benefits for the consumer
Health
A significant benefit of the CleanSmoke technology is that no pollutants from the smoke can pollute the food, because harmful substances such as ash, soot, tar and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are filtered out of the smoke in a multi-stage cleaning process during the production of the primary smoke condensate. This is the reason why the European Union explicitly supports the use of primary smoke condensates (EU Regulation 2065/2003).
Taste
Smokers using CleanSmoke can create a much more delicate smoke flavour. Furthermore, just like with fine seasoning, the combination of different wood notes creates a smoke that is much more refined than the typical beech wood.
Quality
In addition to taste, smoking is also about preservation of food. Foods smoked with CleanSmoke have the same shelf life as in conventional smoking.
Sustainability
Emission reduction
CleanSmoke treated foods impress with a much better life cycle assessment (LCA). For example, smoking with primary smoke condensate produces up to 80 percent less CO₂ emissions than conventional smoking. And because there is no open fire or ember involved in CleanSmoke, no emissions such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO) are released. Moreover, about 40 metric tons less cleaning chemicals would flow into the sewage every year, if just the meat in Germany were smoked with CleanSmoke, and over 550 million kWh of energy would be saved each year.
Resource protection
Not only is less wood needed for the production of primary smoke condensate than for conventional smoking methods, but more importantly, no additional trees need to be chopped at all because only sawdust from the woodworking industry is used. The potential for resource conservation in smoking technology can be illustrated even more clearly with a few more figures on water consumption: With CleanSmoke, approximately 830,000 m3 of water could be saved in Germany alone - as much as the entire population of the German city Kiel drinks in one year.