Chocolate manufacturers face many challenges in their production processes and meeting consumer demands. These challenges include issues such as the loss of expensive ingredients during changeovers, extended changeover times resulting in excessive production downtime, the need to keep up with increased market demand, and addressing customer dissatisfaction with shrinkflation and skimpflation.
The Challenges that Chocolate Manufacturers Face
Firstly, during changeovers from one chocolate product to another, manufacturers often experience the loss of expensive ingredients. These losses not only impact profitability but also contribute to waste, which is undesirable from both economic and environmental perspectives.
Long changeover times exacerbate these issues by leading to excessive production downtime. In the competitive chocolate industry, minimizing downtime is crucial for meeting production targets and satisfying customer demands.
With customer demand increasing, chocolate manufacturers are grappling with requirements to increase product output. As consumers’ taste preferences evolve, manufacturers must adapt their product lines quickly to keep up. This requires flexibility and efficiency in their production processes.
Lastly, customers are becoming more discerning, and they are increasingly dissatisfied with shrinkflation (reducing the size or quantity of a product while maintaining the price) and skimpflation (reducing the quality of ingredients or production processes to cut costs). Balancing cost-efficiency with maintaining product quality and quantity is a constant challenge for chocolate manufacturers.
Strategies for Saving Chocolate and Money
To address these issues, manufacturers must invest in advanced equipment and automation to reduce solidification and changeover times. Additionally, they should focus on optimizing production efficiency and closely monitoring customer feedback to meet the evolving demands of the chocolate market. This industry’s success depends on its ability to adapt to these challenges and continue delivering high-quality products to its consumers.
There are numerous strategies available to address your process-related challenges effectively. You could:
- Expand on Production Lines: One approach involves expanding your production lines, which can help alleviate bottlenecks and increase throughput. By investing in additional equipment and infrastructure, you can streamline your manufacturing process and meet growing demands more efficiently. However, this can be a costly endeavour and relies on space availability within existing facilities.
- Extend Production Hours: Another solution is to extend your production hours. This entails optimizing shift schedules or implementing a continuous manufacturing process. This requires additional staff and may need higher rates of pay to incentivise night-shift employees.
- Consider Product Range Rationalisation: Slimming down the range of products you manufacture can simplify your operations. By focusing on a select range of high-demand products, you can reduce complexity, minimise changeovers, and enhance overall efficiency.
Or you could consider HPS Advanced Liquid Product Recovery (Pigging) Technology.
HPS advanced pigging technology is a cutting-edge solution designed specifically for use in hygienic environments. This innovative technology helps recover valuable liquids left in pipelines, reducing waste and improving yield.
The HPS Solution
HPS pigging technology offers a remarkable solution to the chocolate solidification problem. The term “pigging” might sound unusual in the context of chocolate production, but it refers to a highly efficient method of recovering products from pipelines using a specialised device known as a pig.
Here’s how it works: a pig, made with FDA-approved materials, is inserted into the pipeline through a pig launch station and propelled using a suitable medium, such as compressed air, water, or the next batch of product. As it moves through the pipeline, the chocolate is pushed to its destination, ready for further processing.
The pig is then captured by the pig receiver station before being returned to its housing, ready for CIP procedures to take place.
Most HPS pigging systems are designed with fully automated pigging process control which improves safety, reduces the chances of human error while making vast improvements to process speed, efficiency, and productivity.
How HPS Pigging Technology Saves Chocolate and Money
Many chocolate manufacturers across the world are already using HPS pigging technology and experiencing the many benefits of pigging systems. These benefits include:
- Faster changeovers: Pushing all the product out of the line before CIP procedures take place means that there’s less flushing to do, saving excessive amounts of oil or butter from being used. Plus, HPS pigging systems are compatible with jacketed pipework, ensuring compatibility and ease of use.
- Improved flexibility: Recovering up to 99.5% of product from lines and having faster changeovers will allow you greater flexibility over how you use your lines. Need to produce more white chocolate than milk chocolate today? Not a problem! Finish the sequence, pig and clean the line, and send the new batch through.
- Rapid payback: The beauty of HPS pigging systems goes beyond efficiency; it’s also about economics. The return on investment (ROI) is so impressive that you can typically expect to recoup your initial investment within 6-12 months.
- Maximised profits: You’ve pigged and now you have more chocolate than before. What do you do with it? Sell it! Boost your profits and make that bottom line look a lot healthier than it did before.
HPS Advanced Liquid Product Recovery Technology addresses the critical issues of solidification, changeovers, and market demands with finesse. Faster changeovers, minimal product wastage, rapid payback and high ROI, and increased profits are the sweet rewards that come with embracing HPS pigging technology.
If you’re a chocolate manufacturer looking to streamline your operations, save your chocolate, and bolster your profits, it’s time to consider the transformative power of HPS pigging technology.
About HPS Product Recovery Solutions
HPS Product Recovery Solutions was established in 1995. Since then, we have installed hundreds of pigging systems and liquid transfer solutions across the world, helping manufacturers to recover product and optimise production processes.