Special Report Kennedy's Bakery Production


Kelly Meer, product manager at Bosch Packaging Technology, looks at how and why snack manufacturers should be looking to create single-serve snack packs.


he concept of ‘three meals a day’ is fading away as modern consumers shift to snacking and on-the-go consumption. Accord- ing to Mintel’s Global Food and Drink Trends in 2017 report, the number of global food and drink launches with on-the-go claims increased by 54% in 2016, and this trend is expected to continue.


areas, however, have caused economic downturn, resulting in slower growth of packaged goods consumption in these regions. Categories driven by impulse consumption, such as biscuits and chocolate, are likely to be the most impacted, with consumers expected to switch to cheaper variants. One way for consumers to cut costs is to purchase single-serve snack packages. Whether it’s a cereal bar between breakfast and lunch, a snack or an afternoon treat, products should be made available in these formats.


Bosch Packaging Technology contin- ues to innovate and preempt technologi- cal requirements to meet evolving con- sumer tastes. One of the key questions asked by customers is: “How can biscuit manufacturers adjust to various formats without breaking the bank?” Working closely with biscuit producers striving to address single-serve, small and family-sized packing trends, Bosch advanced its packaging machines to deliver enhanced format flexibility for pile packs. There are three main areas the company focused on:


1. Unprecedented flexibility


In the past, pack configuration options were limited by packaging equipment.


bakeryproduction.co.uk Jan/Feb 2018 Kennedy's Bakery Production 27 Uncertain political situations in certain


The number of biscuits in a stack was determined by the number of extraction magazines – or a multiple of it. Latest Bosch advancements, on the other hand, offer a format flexibility of the magazine feeder that is independent from the incoming supply. The Smart Pile Loader (SPL), for example, is able to extract a variable number of products from each magazine, allowing manu- facturers to select an ideal stack count for their consumers that is independent from the number of incoming lanes (lane flexibility). As a result, producers can use less magazines, saving production space and achieving the same amount of biscuits per pack.


2. Rightsizing is on the rise


To further satisfy ever-changing consum- er demands, biscuit producers require flexibility in the number of biscuits per pack. According to Euromonitor, a shift to smaller pack sizes for snacks repre- sented the highest rise in packaging in recent years and is set to continue. This trend is driven by growth in the snacking industry, portion control and consumer mindfulness over sugar intake. Afford- ability is another contributing factor. Coupled with frequent promotions and seasonal fluctuations, the ability to change the number of products per pack easily can positively impact the bottom line. To make rightsizing effort-


Evaluating the snack revolution T


less, modern packaging solutions on the market enable packs with one to 28 biscuits in one to four stacks on the same system.


3. Dynamic flexibility


While manufacturing is moving towards Industry 4.0, allowing machines to ‘talk’ to each other and adjust production accordingly, old generation technolo- gies still require manual interventions to ensure continuous production flow. One example is biscuit supply to extraction magazines. If one vibratory channel is low on product, the entire production comes to a halt or incomplete biscuit stacks are produced. Often enough, employees have to manually shift supply from one lane to the other to balance the product flow. Modern technologies, on the contrary, offer automatic lane balancing to com- pensate for variances in product supply upstream. For example, issues with the oven can cause some lanes to run low on product or have batches of burnt cook- ies. Biscuit feeders can now automati- cally detect empty single lanes without operator interference and ‘inform’ other magazines to extract missing biscuits to complete the pack per recipe. As a result, downtime is avoided and producers can achieve consistently high product quality without product or material waste.


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