Sugar/Dextrose & Peanut Flour Conveying Systems for Snack Food Manufacturer

General Description

Americans spend over $180 billion per year on snack foods with overall growth of about 4-percent per year. Almost half of Americans eat three or more snacks a day. The increased demand for snack foods is big business for many snack food manufacturing companies and plants are expanding to manage the increase in demand.

A large confectionery company, with sales upwards of over 20 billion dollars per year specializes in making chocolate and peanut butter flavored snacks. With snacks rising in popularity in recent years, the end user needed to double production. KWS developed a conveyor system to help with their production needs and fit in the required confined space.

Design Parameters

1. Product Type: Sugar/Dextrose & Peanut Flour
2. Material Density: 21 to 24 Lbs. per Cubic Foot
3. Capacity: 50 to 164 Cubic Feet per Hour
4. Duty: Batching, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week

KWS Advantages

KWS works with every major food manufacturer and supplies conveying systems to many plants across the US. For this specific application, KWS designed and manufactured a 6-inch diameter, three screw conveyor system to lift sugar/dextrose 20-feet in elevation and a 9-inch diameter, five conveyor system to lift peanut flour 40-feet in elevation. KWS sales and engineering teams work directly with the food manufacturers to ensure our conveying systems fit flawlessly in the space provided and are fit for conveying food products.

KWS Special Features

For this specific application, conveyors were constructed with stainless steel and polished to 150-grit finish on all product contact surfaces to meet food grade requirements. With three out of the eight screw conveyors being vertical screw conveyors, KWS effectively fit the compact design of the vertical screw conveyors into the layout provided to efficiently elevate material to its next destination.

KWS designed the conveyor system to the batching requirements set forth by end user. Batching is when a predetermined amount of material is conveyed at one time, so the conveyors are subject to turning on and off several times per hour instead of constantly running like most applications. With vertical screw conveyors needing to run at a very high RPM to convey material vertically against gravity and high torque at start-up, KWS designed the two 9-inch vertical screw conveyors to have 3-bolt drive connections with heavy duty bolt pads to combat the high torque requirements associated with batching and eliminate the concern of coupling bolt fatigue failure.

KWS also designed a special offset, belt driven, drive configuration on two of the three vertical screw conveyors. Doing so, allowed all the equipment to fit comfortably within the confined space of the layout.