AVOIDING GIVING IT AWAY

PRECISION: When 60 grams of grated cheese is spread on a pizza base, it must be 60 grams. If it is 55 grams, customers are sold short, and if it is 65 grams manufacturers are giving cheese away free

Virtually all manufacturers are familiar with the issue of “Give Away”. For manual spreading of cheese on pizzas, “Give Away” is generally 8-12%. And although the industry regards grated cheese as a relatively cheap ingredient, a company producing 250 pizzas per minute using manual labour to spread the topping, will have given away so much in just six months that the manufacturer could have bought a fully automatic machine which not only spreads the cheese precisely but also doses it accurately.

The traditional recipe of a Neapolitan pizza is a crispy base, thick tomato sauce and 60 grams of grated cheese. If local pizza manufacturers use manual labour to spread the topping, they are probably depriving themselves of significant profits. Nearly all surveys show that pizza manufacturers, fearing any accusation of giving short measure, put more topping on the pizza than is stated on the label.

Customised automation
“Such a pizza manufacturer is very typical of our customers,” says director Lars Skov of the Danish engineering company Bilwinco, which specialises in customised solutions in weighing, filling and packaging for both the food and non-food industries.

“It may be a butcher who has a good idea for a ready-made dish, and prepares it in the kitchen at home. But at some point in time, he realises that in order for his business to grow, automation is necessary, and here we provide the right solutions for weighing and packaging his product.”

Handling greasy products
Bilwinco’s experience in food texture and consistency has attracted a growing number of customers. All manufacturers of convenience foods know the problems of handling the various ingredients in a ready-made meal, where solid and fluid elements need to be placed precisely and in the right amount on the plate or plastic tray. Kraft Foods in the US has recently chosen a Bilwinco solution.

“Kraft Foods had developed a poultry product, which was a bit greasy and sticky in the finished version, and there was no process machine on the market that was able to handle the product in the right way,” says Lars Skov. “We developed a unique solution for them which not only handles the product precisely, but also helps to present it invitingly and hygienically after packaging.”

Trouble-shooters
All Bilwinco’s solutions are specially designed, with typically 40% being new applications targeted to a specific task. The remaining 60% are standard components, which are an important part of customer-differentiated design.

http://www.bilwinco.com