Case Study

RSS

Click Here To Download:
• Volumetric Feeders Help Create Chocolatey Satisfaction

In June 2010, The Hershey Company, Hershey, Pa., opened a new interactive attraction at its HERSHEY'S CHOCOLATE WORLD attraction. Called HERSHEY'S Create Your Own Candy Bar, this hands-on attraction gives visitors the ability to create a customized candy bar with up to three inclusions, operate authentic factory equipment, and design individualized packaging for the candy bar

When designing this attraction, the company needed to ensure a perfectly made candy bar for every visitor, so it selected volumetric feeders to consistently fill the various ingredients into the base bars.

To make a candy bar, a visitor uses a touchscreen to select the ingredients and starts the production process by pulling a lever. A food-grade belt conveyor then moves a HERSHEY'S milk chocolate base bar under a series of feeders that fill the selected ingredients into the basebar's recessed cavity. After the filled base bar moves through an enrobing and cooling process that seals in the ingredients, it's transferred to the attraction's packaging area, where the visitor selects a custom overwrap sleeve for the completed product. The candy bar is then placed in a carton that's put into a souvenir tin, and the selected overwrap sleeve is placed around the tin, which is given to the visitor at the end of the process.

"We needed feeders that could reliably feed small batch sizes in short time intervals and handle a wide range of ingredients with disparate particle sizes and flow characteristics," says Krista Cessna,Hershey associate staff engineer. "For this project, we found that gravimetric feeding wasn't an option because of the small ingredient amounts and short fill times. So we contacted several volumetric feeder suppliers, and one of them wanted to conduct tests at their test center, so I sent them a variety of ingredients for testing."

This supplier,SchenckAccuRate, operates a full-service test center at its facility in Whitewater,Wis., and manufactures and supplies volumetric and gravimetric feeders, vibratory feeders, weighfeeders, controls, custom systems, and other bulk solids handling equipment to the food, chemical, pharmaceutical, plastics, and other industries.

Schenck AccuRate conducted multiple tests to determine the ideal equipment and preliminary operating parameters for the ingredients and sent the results back to the company. "I then took the base bars to their test center, and we set up a belt conveyor and watched the feeders fill the ingredients into the base bar cavities," says Cessna. "This allowed us to see that the various ingredients have different trajectories when they discharge from a feeder and that they bounce differently when they hit the base bar, causing some of them to spill out.We found that the discharge height is critical to not having the pieces bounce out, so we adjusted the feeder 's height and horizontal position for each ingredient, enabling each one to hit the target more accurately. We also determined the feeder run time and feedrate for each ingredient."

After successfully completing the tests, the company placed a purchase order for two volumetric screw feeders and four volumetric vibratory feeders. Cessna says, "We selected these feeders not only because of their ability to precisely handle small batch sizes in short times, but also because of their ability to feed a number of ingredients with different densities and particle sizes."

Download the full case study

Click Here To Download:
• Volumetric Feeders Help Create Chocolatey Satisfaction