“Many products require post-drying in the moulding starch to produce a desired hard texture. This includes those products that crystallise specifically due to moisture removal in the moulding starch, such as toffees (fudge) or liqueur pralines. Starch-free moulding technology is therefore not competitive for consumer products.”
Quality assurance in gummy confectionery
The fruit and gum market constantly innovates, introducing new products and imaginative mixtures. The challenge is that these complex end products must meet ever-increasing quality demands. Quality has to be maintained continuously, to retain regular customers and avoid losing them to competing products. This means the trends are for quality assurance and differentiation in the market, through the fulfilment of quality requirements. Brand reputation is so important, yet in the confectionery business all it takes is one momentary slip in standards for this to be damaged and devalued. If just one batch of defective products should reach the end of the production line - or worse still, a foreign material potentially harmful to health - the commercial repercussions can be catastrophic. Which means that installing optical sorting machines on confectionery lines is crucial not only for product quality, but also for food safety. Christian Hofsommer, Area Sales Manager at TOMRA says:
“Quality requirements for jelly and gums are diverse and sometimes very market-specific. In all markets, of course, it is essential for production lines to detect and remove all
28 Kennedy’s Confection March 2022
“Starch-free depositing is a simpler process with hygienic characteristics”
types of foreign materials, such as metal, wood, plastic, and even particles of glass.” In addition to taking care of food safety, there’s also the need to achieve consistently high product quality. This means guarding against cross contamination, deformed or clumped products, and starch clumps, which can get into the product stream after the jelly preparation is dried and removed from the mould. “Fortunately, there is an effective solution to this problem, because TOMRA’s sorting technology can distinguish the white starch on the back of certain jelly products,” Hofsommer says. Another challenge arises from the fact that sorting machines can be located on the line before or after the product is oiled, depending on the factory layout, but oiling can make the product sticky and sorting trickier. This demands a very particular type of product handling. Giving
KennedysConfection.com
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