Precise Depositing Supports Product Consistency and Limits Waste

Equipment for depositing and filling ensures an accurate dosage of ingredients with various consistencies, achieved at required speeds, with clockwork precision.

Depositing is a task that many bakers do by hand, since it’s a relatively delicate operation that demands precision and often entails product or ingredient changes.

Specialized equipment helps bakery and food producers move from manual to semi-automatic depositing (or fully automated) in order to increase production yield, create better product consistency, reduce product waste and meet labeling requirements.

Ultimate Flexibility is the Goal

A traditional piston depositor is usually equipped with a hopper to hold the fresh batter. As an alternative, GEA Bakery offers a pressurized manifold, which feeds the batter at a constant pressure and flowrate to each piston of the depositor. Consequently, the precision of deposit is greatly improved. The manifold can even be jacketed with warm or chilled water passing through: this further enhances the precision of the deposit, as the specific weight and viscosity of the batter is kept constant.

GEA has developed a great flexibility in the piston-deposit technology: for example, a double head unit, can deposit two different color shots inside the same paper cup, thus allowing the production of innovative products and providing flexibility to the deposit process. 

The piston depositor can be purchased with high-efficiency servomotors; this feature guarantees even higher precision of the deposit and higher efficiencies; also the no-cup=no-deposit feature can be installed as an option in this type of system. 

GEA Bakery covers a wide range of depositing technologies:

• Piston volumetric depositors are used for fluid cakes with or without inclusions;
• Lobe pumps depositors for soft dough cookies in general or high density batter;
• Manifold depositors are used when little drops are required i.e. when cookie or cake small quantity of topping is required.
• Finger type toppers are used to deposit different crumbles, cheese or vegetables;
• Volumetric pocket depositors for crystal granulated products;
• Vibrating toppers find their application for dry products;
• Wire depositor far powders (icing sugar, cocoa, nutmeg);
• Volumetric extruders are ideal for shortbread dough.

“Since the very beginning of our activity, all our equipment has been designed with the modularity and flexibility design in mind. As a consequence, we are used also to provide Custom-designed equipment, which can be installed in limited space available and fully integrated into existing system even in respect of their automation and control systems. As an example, our depositor machines can be installed directly onto an existing steel band oven without having to cut and weld again the oven’s conveyor. Our final Customer saves time of installation and money,” GEA’s specialists told us.

Handling Product Variation

Handtmann provides solutions for pumping, dosing, dough dividing, forming and cutting. All these equipment solutions come with a Handtmann portioning machine. The single machine is adaptable with different depositing devices. “With this flexibility, we are able to provide machines for a large variety of baked goods such as liquids, creams, rye doughs, wheat doughs, short pastry, marzipan, toppings or fillings. Product weights are freely adjustable from 0.5 g upwards, no matter the application: using a hand valve, filling into tubs, containers, trays, jars with our dosing valve or depositing directly onto dough sheets for multilane applications. Therefore, we are able to operate in a continuous dosing, strip dosing or spot dosing,” Handtmann’s representatives explained.

Handtmann portioning and depositing technology is successfully used for different kinds of applications. Whether it be meat, bakery products, dairy products, fish, convenience food or other areas of application. In the bakery sector, the company currently sees a strong trend for multilane solutions. Especially the depositing onto dough sheets with pastry fillings, vegetables fillings or savory fillings seem to be ever more interesting for their customers. Handtmann’s multilane depositing systems feature a modular structure and can hence be easily customized to meet individual demands. 

“For the integration in existing production lines, we are able to offer different solutions. As well as the communication, the control and the synchronization with other machine equipment in the production line,” Handtmann underlines.