Industrial Bakery automates handling of seeds with Piab’s vacuum conveyors

Phil Black - PII Editor 29/04/2021

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Gentle handling of key ingredients as well as reducing potential injury to staff prompted the industrial bakery Austerschmidt in Germany to switch the handling of seeds to an automated process and, in the piFLOW®f vacuum conveyor, they found the critical tool.

A large number of seeds are used in the production of bread to give the baked goods their individual taste. A solution was needed for the conveying of sunflower and pumpkin seeds as well as linseed. As Austerschmidt Fresh Bakery in Delbrück had already successfully installed a Piab vacuum conveyor on another machine, they again turned to Piab to offer a solution. The aim was to make the process more ergonomic for the employees, minimising any bending or lifting, while also ensuring the process ran more efficiently and achieve greater process reliability through automation.

The piFLOW®f conveyor now automatically fills the hopper for the seed spreading machine without an employee having to do this manually with a shovel and delivers the seeds neatly onto the conveyor belt where the bread comes into contact with them. Any seeds that don’t stick to the product fall into a system that returns them back to the conveyor thereby ensuring that almost 100% of the seeds are used and any waste is kept to a minimum.

The piFLOW®f conveyor was also mounted on a mobile frame so it could service either of the companies two seed adding lines, further increasing its operational use and providing a faster ROI.

Ludger Pape, factory manager of the Austerschmidt bakery explains: “It was important for us that our employees go home without back pain and that we use the food resource as gently as possible. At the same time, we implemented the conveyor to achieve a continuously more stable process by removing the requirement to constantly refill seeds into the process as well as freeing up the worker to concentrate fully on the process of making the dough. This is important because every dough is different and always requires slight adjustments to the machine. This focus results in consistently high quality of product, which is our top priority.”

“Above all, we were impressed by Piab's rapid planning and implementation, taking our requirements for integration into account. We were also delighted that the delivery timeframe was met and that we were able to put the vacuum conveyor into operation very quickly, ”added Dirk Austerschmidt, Managing Director at Austerschmidt Fresh Bakers.

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