Size or Shape of Products

Size or Shape of Products. Every so often we see that products don’t hold their shape as we intended it to be:

• Oval biscuits that should haven been round, and don’t fit the packaging.
• Too much spreading, they don’t fit in the packaging.
• All of a sudden the weight doesn’t add up anymore.
• Height is so high that you have to fit in 1 or 2 less products in a pack
• Height is so low that you can fit in e.g. 3 extra products

So what can be the cause of this? In 9 out 10 cases it has to do with consistency:

• They way raw materials are handled, stored and weighted
• The amount of resting a dough receives (or didn’t)
• Environmental temperature changes
• Fluctuations in raw material supply (products from nature do vary – you know!)

If it isn’t one of these, it is most probably the way the process is controlled during mixing and forming/ shaping (incl depositing/ moulding/ extruding). Dough and batter densities in combination with their temperatures tend to be a quite good predictor on how your final product will be.

In several cases we see that when moving toward more automated handling, these product variations tend to be reduced, in certain cases the product quality deteriorates a bit when comparing to the best performances, where as it improves a lot compared to it’s worst performance.

Recent posts