Extending snack products

The Baker Perkins Snack Master allows a wide choice of equipment to be added to an existing production line.

A line making basic, direct expanded products such as corn curls, chipsticks and maize rings can be extended in stages to produce a full range of high-specification, complex snacks including wholegrain/multigrain and sweet or savoury filled pillows with intriguing shapes, textures and surface patterns.

New products can be introduced quickly and short-life products become a profitable option.

Snacks filled with real fruit in co-extruded bar, filled pillow, or imaginative ‘credit card’ shapes are recent innovations that will appeal to health-conscious consumers. Each installation is individually specified to match the customer’s exact product needs.

Key to the Snack Master concept is the SBX Master twin-screw cooker extruder, a solid-barrel unit offering process flexibility through modular design, high free-volume geometry and high torque capacity. In its simplest form this machine produces conventional direct expanded snacks.

Additional units such as cutters, crimpers and co-extrusion equipment may be added over time to increase the range of end products to include pillows, tubes and filled snacks.

The concept may be extended to incorporate equipment from other processes to further increase the range of products that can be made. For example, cereal grain cookers for wholegrains or multigrains; Thermoglide2 toasters for oil-free expansion of extruded pellets; shredding rolls for snacks with a distinctive layered texture; and syrup-based coating systems for oil-free coating and flavouring.