Kellogg's Snack Food Savings

Introduction

Customer background
The Kellogg bakery in Wyoming/Michigan making snack bars wanted to reduce scrap waste on the cooling tunnels.
Application
On a 165 ft (50 m) dual-flow air recirculation cooling tunnel system, the raw material was sticking to the belt. This meant the bakery had to scrape the belt and use a steam cleaner to prevent build-up of the raw product on the belt. This constant scraping and cleaning significantly reduced the life of the belt. They also were having problems with inconsistent snack bar weights. When the raw material did not release from the belt, this caused voids in the bottom of the bar. When the bars were enrobed in chocolate, more chocolate had to be used on the bottom to fill the voids.
Recommended product
Belts from the Cleanline range, coated with Polyolefin

Example of a Cleanline belt with superb release properties in a Swiss chocolate factory

_{Image: Example of a Habasit Cleanline belt with superb release properties in a Swiss chocolate factory}

Measures
Habasit switched the Kellogg bakery to its Cleanline product range. This allowed good thermal conductivity to chill the bars and provided the release of the raw material that was missing with the previous competitor’s belt. Because the product was no longer sticking to the belt, the bakery was able to stop the extreme cleaning and change the metal scraper to a neoprene rubber scraper to remove oil only from the belt.

Benefits
The change to Habasit Cleanline reduced scrap of raw product from 6,000 lb (2720 kg = 2.7 ton) per month to 1,000 lb (450 kg) per month. Water usage was also reduced because they no longer had to steam clean the belt. This Habasit Cleanline type provided a consistent bottom to the snack bars, so the chocolate usage was also reduced because they were no voids to fill on the bottom of the bars. Over a year, Habasit was able to save this Kellogg bakery $72,798.00 in waste reduction.