Baker Perkins has developed a high-speed colour-change system for packs of assorted extruded cereals and snacks.
The ‘spectrum’ technique extends the extrusion capability of Baker Perkins and cuts production costs by enabling changeover between colour variations of an extruded product.
A typical application in the cereals sector is mixed-fruit colours in a single packet, says Baker Perkins, and for snacks, matching the colour of vegetable-flavoured snacks such as carrot, beetroot, tomato, broccoli or peas in a single pack.
Conventionally, colours are injected into the extruder barrel to ensure good mixing, but this results in very slow transitions when the colour is changed, leading to considerable waste before a correctly coloured new product emerges.
Here, the skid-based system allows each colour to be produced in short bursts, and the blending of different-coloured products can be accomplished in-line, eliminating the need for off-line storage.
