Conveyor removes knots from pretzel enrobing operation
A snack food company installs two horizontal-motion conveyors in its pretzel enrobing operation to improve production and reduce labor costs.
For more than 50 years, Georgia Nut Co., Skokie, Ill., has been developing and manufacturing snack foods and confections, including hard candies, roasted and salted nuts, and an assortment of coated or sugar-shelled nuts, fruits, and pretzels. One popular item is enrobed pretzels, which are available with various chocolate or yogurt coatings. To produce the pretzels, the company uses an enrobing process in which the pretzels are arranged in several single-file rows on a belt conveyor that moves them through a chocolate or yogurt enrobing machine and cooling tunnel. In the past, vibratory conveyors were used in each of the three enrobing lines to arrange the pretzels into rows and feed them from a hopper to a belt conveyor. However, the conveyors’ vibratory motion caused production problems, so the company decided to find a better way to align and feed the pretzels to the enrobing equipment.