Confectionery & Snack Foods
The Confectionery and Snack Food segment includes food products such as chocolates, candy bars, sweets, jellies, gums, hard and chew candies, through to snack foods such as potato chips, crisps, ready to eat nuts, trail mix, savory snacks, energy and granola bars.
Challenges with Confectionary and Snack Foods
Some challenges found within this sector include:
- Large amount of processing and production of the food product, which increase the chance of stainless steel contamination caused by processing and packaging machine failure
- Warm, sticky and dusty environments and the need for regular cleaning of machines, conveyors and belts
- Increasing use of metalized film and foil in packaging of many snack and confectionery products, making conventional metal detection difficult to use
- Integrity of products during the production process (i.e. cracking or missing coating on a chocolate bar) or missing items
- Product temperature varies throughout processing lines which can affect product signals in metal detection equipment
- Some snacks are made up many ingredients, which give consistent density challenges to x-ray systems
Why Use Loma?
- Loma has recognized solutions for metal detection, x-ray inspection, dynamic in-line Checkweighing, and can provide combined Check and Detect solutions, where detection and weighing occur on the same system
- With Loma’s Designed to Survive® philosophy, equipment is designed to withstand the demanding environments found within many factories
- Gravity fed inspection systems such as Vertical Falls for dried snacks and the compact Waferthin for installation above bagging machines