Country Reports - France

The Latest Production Technology for Soft or Chewy Candy

October 2017

Country Reports - France

The Latest Production Technology for Soft or Chewy Candy

October 2017

Traditionally a soft candy production line was a cooker, followed by a cooling drum or cooling belt. Then the mass might have required maturation for several hours in a curing room. Or the cooled mass might have been sent into a pulling machine or a Z-blade mixer for crystallization. From these machines, the mass was manually fed into one or split and sent into several down-stream forming lines. However, another technology exists, with the development of process equipment. Proform's MD Christian Gand explains, "Our machine, called an INTRUDER, because it takes in hot candy mass directly from our client's cooker, is a 4-functions-in-one machine; it is also labor-saving. So the client cooker, connected to our Intruder, is all the process machinery a soft candy manufacturer needs, before the forming equipment." Space is minimized, as one Intruder replaces traditional production equipment: a cooling drum or cooling belt, as well as a pulling machine or a Z-blade mixer. Manual labor needs are eliminated. With an Intruder, no labor is required to handle the product during the process or to feed it into down-stream forming lines. For example, no operator has to stand in front of the cooling drum to watch the process and to prevent trouble like oil / fat missing, candy sticking. The Intruder eliminates this. Gand continues, "With traditional pulling machines, there is always a possibility that lumps of candy take a short-cut through the system, and these lumps mean that the product won't have the same texture as it should."