This is certainly the most delicious product to be thinking about when planning your growth.

A good recipe, a tasty product and product consistency can lead to growth in local and international markets for your product. You could be at the stage where you are moving up from manufacturing in your home kitchen and supplying some ‘close to home’ retailers and market stalls now to looking at supplying more establish national retailers. Or you could already be well into your production and looking to improve consistency or capacity. Either way, here are some things to think about when specifying your equipment:

• TIP: If you are small and expanding go check out what your competitors are doing in store – see their bar sizes and weights and consider how you will compete with them for shelf space
• TIP: If you are getting ready to move to the export market consider Flow Packing your bars with a Nitrogen Flush. Not only will it give your product shelf life for its long journey but it will also help protect your product from those bumps and shoves its about to go through on its transport journey.

Gather this info and lets see how we can help you:

1. Processing of Raw Material

Whether you are making nougat bars, brittle bars or cereal bars is likely you need to grind down some raws and cook them.

• What is the product you are going to be making?
• Will the product contains Nuts? Fruits? and if so which nuts and fruits will it be?
• How do you need to process the raws before they can be cooked in your recipe? Do they need to be ground? sieved? separated? roasted?
• How many Kg per hour do you need to make?
• What will be the batch sizes?

 

• TIP: When considering batch sizes and kg per hour you should use your ‘per unit’ sales targets of finished and packed goods to work backwards to get to this figure. Here is a little example: Say you want to sell 100g bars and in order to make the business case successful you must sell 100 000 bars per month. We now know you 10 tons of product per month. On a 5 days working week (4 weeks per month) at 7 working hours per day you need to make 70kg per hour of finished product (500kg per day). It may only take 30 minutes to cook a single batch but how long will it take to you clean the pot before the next batch? And how long to load the raw materials? Another 30min? Maybe 1 hour? Consider it as the right size batching pot may not necessarily give you the right size daily production.

2. Cutting to size

Bars and Bites are the common terms for what you are making and when increasing your production and looking for new confectionary equipment it is key to be able to communicate:

• The dimensions of each of the bars or bites you are planning to make
• The weights of the bars or bites
• How many of each SKU (variant) do you need to make per hour?
• Does your product need to be cut warm and does it need to be cooled down immediately after cutting? Think of the brittle bar….

Download this brochure to take some ideas of what is possible: Brochure Mia Food Tech 2023

This equipment can be tricky to work out as waste and rework has to be considered when sizing these machines. So Contact Us and we are always happy to chat.