Published on
March 31, 2022
By
Nick Halliday
Pumpkin-spiced bars for fall, peppermint swirls for the holidays – if there’s one thing bar and chocolate manufacturers can count on, it’s change. The bar they’re producing this week is unlikely to be the one on the line next week – or even the next shift.
That has always been a problem and one which has only intensified with tightened allergen cleaning regulations and the rising demand for SKUs.
Traditionally, manufacturers have solved that problem with waste – they waste space and power maintaining more than one melt tank, waste product on crossovers or waste time and productivity on laborious cleaning processes. Where there’s waste, there’s an opportunity for innovation – and that was the starting point for our most recent melter design, the V20.
Every element of the V20 has been designed to make it faster, simpler and more cost-effective to produce more SKUs. Core to that is its grid melter, which eliminates the need for melt tanks. In their place are components that are easily removed or accessed and contact surfaces are 3A polished as standard.
Simply clean it in place or wheel it to a wash area, then drain the small quantity of excess chocolate and hose it down. The separated components are easy to clean quickly and dry thoroughly.
The business value of seasonal variants and special runs cannot be understated – 25% of total revenue and profits across all industries comes from the launch of new products. Capturing a piece of that profit comes down to efficiency. Any waste in the production process can make a project unprofitable, even if it garners impressive sales. For co-manufacturers, this is even more critical – minimising waste and increasing efficiency delivers better profit margins and a competitive edge. The V20 is perfectly positioned to deliver this, allowing fast, efficient changeovers that minimise waste of all kinds.
Who knows what the next flavour rage will be? Your facility needs to be ready to jump on the next cookies-and-cream fad or pivot to the next keto craze if it’s going to stay relevant to consumers. The V20’s flexibility gives you far more options – wheel it over to different areas then plug and play with entirely new sets of equipment, unlocking agility in your plant. That’s particularly important for co-manufacturers, who need to be ready to say ‘yes’ to any request that comes in the door.
Arguably, tightened allergen regulations are a good thing – more people can feel confident to safely enjoy your bars or chocolate. But you can’t deny they create more headaches at the production end. In a traditional setup, that means SKUs with peanuts or other highly allergenic ingredients would require separate melt tanks, taking up more space, more power and more product waste. Regulations also make smaller runs entirely uneconomical. With the V20’s easy washdown design, you can remove all those barriers. Melt chocolate on demand, then dismantle and hose down.
The V20 keeps your facility up and running for longer – you won’t have to stop the line for a day to clean components or wait overnight for a new kettle of chocolate to melt. With the V20, it’s instant – you get molten chocolate soon as you need it.
As markets and consumer demands shift at an ever-faster rate, manufacturers need plants that are agile enough to keep up. That means looking carefully at all aspects – including how they melt chocolate. The V20 melter has been designed to build flexibility and efficiency into that part of the manufacturing process. It’s based on decades of collected experience working directly with manufacturers to keep them one step ahead of the market.
