Equipment for Food Flavourings, Seasonings and Spices

HOW WE CAN HELP

Designing for Production Flexibility That Evolves as You Grow

Matcon has over 4 decades of creating top quality manufacturing systems that have helped our customers around the world become more competitive, respond to changing consumer tastes, whilst achieving their manufacturing objectives.

We design lean, agile production systems that are based on IBCs and container-based mixing. Using a parallel processing design, the manufacturing process steps (formulation, mixing, packing & cleaning) are no longer coupled together, but are undertaken simultaneously, eliminating the waiting time between batches. Efficiency gains of 300% or more have been witnessed – with reductions in inventory and warehousing also possible. Because IBCs are used to transport materials between the decoupled production steps, all process steps are harmonized, resulting in high OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) rates.

The geometry of Matcon IBCs and Cone Valve technology is ideally suited to overcome the challenges of the food powders and flavourings. There are no dead zones within the IBC and the Cone Valve promotes discharge through mass-flow, which creates a ‘first in-first out’ flow, ensuring the powder material remains mixed and particles don’t separate or become de-mixed during the discharge process. This ultimately results in a superior product quality in the final pack with strict control over what goes in.

Our systems are constructed from modular pieces of equipment which can be adjusted to suit your needs and grow with you. Food manufacturers can start small with a couple of IBCs that can be used to assemble batches offline, then scale up by decoupling more of the manufacturing steps until you reach a full IBC system with container-based tumble mixing at its heart. Using the IBC as the blending vessel means there is no need for clean-down between recipe batches, saving time and reducing contamination risk.

As an adjunct to our container blending capabilities we also offer high shear mixing with our Intensifier and the ability to make Liquid Addition without stopping the blender.

OUR APPROACH

Understanding the Customer Needs for Safety and Flexibility

Our team of experts, with collective decades of experience, will work with you to understand your goals, alleviate your production challenges and create a manufacturing system that offers a future-proof solution. 

Our systems are designed to provide production efficiency and flexibility, with containment, whilst minimizing any waste & WIP. Because we operate across a number of market sectors, we can bring that experience to bear in our solutions – we understand the complexities of the food sector in terms of recipe variety, whilst our pharma experience means we also understand the operating parameters of working in highly regulated industries.

The ability to test your product in full-scale equipment will give you confidence in making the purchase We have a number of sites around the globe, where you can bring your materials and test them out. We can also enhance the testing using NIR (Near Infrared spectroscopy) which will optimize the blending times further – saving time per batch and enabling more batch production within a single shift.

We have a deep understanding of manufacturing processes and the expertise to integrate solutions that work in harmony. We are also able to partner with our IDEX MPT colleagues to integrate milling, sifting and powder dispersion equipment should the design require it.