‘Here’s one I cleaned earlier’: Pre-cleaned cooling tunnels and enrobers

Mads Hedstrøm, president of sales at Aasted, said: “They [confectioners] are getting into troubles if they are running around with old machinery from the late Sixties. They can have issues with cleanability and some of their machines are too old and you have build-up of bacteria.”​

Aasted recently conducted a sanitary design for its cooling tunnels after requests from customers.

“Now, you can pull out the heart of the machine where you have the pumps and the tanks etc. then you can have another one ready, which is already cleaned. After that you can take your time to clean the other part of the machine.”​

Enrobing machines                                                                                                                         ​

Hedstrøm said the same principle could be applied to extruders, depositors and enrobers.

“Say today I’m running a certain kind of compound chocolate on an enrober and I need to do a changeover – You can pull the heart out of the machine and you can have another heart that you can add in. Then your stop is only for 10 minutes maximum.”​

“You can hose, clean and dry the part you are pulling out and make it ready for the next changeover.”​

Cooling tunnels​

Aasted’s sanitary design for its cooling tunnels uses no screws and everything is fully welded.

“First of all we made everything 100% stainless steel and then we made it hoseable – that means we don’t have any gaskets sitting where water can find its way in.​

“We have the possibility to both open the top and the bottom of the cooling tunnel, which normally when you look at cooling tunnels you can only open the top part,”​ said Hedstrøm.

The Aasted sales chief said that hygienic design had been a leading priority for manufacturers and suppliers for the past 30 years. “It’s not new. It’s just changing continuously. It’s like buying a new car – it has to be safer.”​