Christian Hofsommer, Area Sales Manager at sorting solutions provider Tomra Food, illus-trates the challenges in confectionery production, especially with gummy candy products, and informs about the wide range of support options available from his company.

Brand reputation is extremely important. Yet, in the confectionery business, all it takes is one momentary slip in standards for this to be damaged and devalued. If just one batch of defective products should reach the end of the production line – or even worse, a foreign material potentially harmful to health – the commercial repercussions can be catastrophic. This means that installing optical sorting machines on confectionery lines is crucial not only for product quality, but also to assure food safety.

Today’s sorting technologies achieve an accuracy that manual sorting simply cannot. And at the same time as looking over the production line like guardian angels, automated sorters also enhance product hygiene, solve labour-related challenges, increase throughput, maximize yield, and gather data that can unlock further improvements in line efficiency.

sweets processing: Mr Hofsommer, what does Tomra provide in the field of process control and automation for the confectionery industry?
Christian Hofsommer: Tomra Food cleans product streams at different points in a production line. Our optical sorters sort out foreign objects, faulty products or cross-contaminations and ensure that in the end only what belongs in the packaging comes into the packaging.

sp: Uniformity is important for confectionery. What does your company offer to ensure every product is sorted accordingly?
Hofsommer: Our sorters have the flexibility to sort a wide variety of products in different states. Each product has different characteristics and properties to consider. Sorting can be done by colour, product characteristics and shape. Using partially customized feeding and take away components, we ensure that a product is free of defects on the one hand, and we also ensure that product losses in the context of defect ejection are minimized thanks to the precision of the sorters and the detection technologies used.

sp: How important do you think automation is in the confectionery sector today?
Hofsommer: Reliable optical sorting is essential for a manufacturer’s brand image. The consistently high quality and premium appearance of a product is a prerequisite for a high-quality impression, especially in the field of confectionery, and supports a loyal, very long-term customer relationship. The advantage of automated optical sorting in this area is that no subjective decisions are made. The sorter cleans the product constantly according to predetermined quality requirements, hour by hour, day by day.

sp: With greater focus on food hygiene in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, how important is process control?
Hofsommer: Extensive and reliable process automation ensures more hygienic products. The more reliable a system works, the more production steps are involved, the less manual intervention, the less movements or encounters prevail in the periphery of the process. Process control means not only monitoring a process, but also optimizing it based on real-time data, and thereby further reducing interventions.

sp: Is it helpful to the business offering to both automate parts of the process or offer to enable the operators to control the process?
Hofsommer: The simple, intuitive control of processes by the operators is highly important. Ideally, employees interact by using data that is actively generated and deploy them quickly and qualified to improve processes and settings. We also actively support this with our optional, cloud-based real-time monitoring Tomra Insight by means of graphically processed statistics, remote access options and digitally available spare parts lists through which you can order directly.

sp: Which trends are you noticing in this area, and what is your prognosis for the future?
Hofsommer: The trend is clearly towards more automation, also in the field of optical sorting. In larger companies, production monitoring is getting more and more important, and the possibility to do so is becoming more and more self-evident. Smaller companies must be given the opportunity to at least keep these options open step by step through appropriate retrofits, because often the investment in automated optical reading is already a big step in itself. At the same time, expectations for product quality and product safety will continue to rise – both from the point of view of the food retailer and from the point of view of the end customer. To meet these requirements, manufacturers need to control and automate their processes. Increasing online orders shorten supply chains and automatically reduce control mechanisms. This makes it all the more important that always fault-free products leave the factories of manufacturers.