Baking & Snack - December 2022 - 36

JIMMY! FUNCTIONAL SNACKS
engineering, so with the help of a professional mechanic,
we're hoping to home in on the process. "
A hands-on operation
Walk into Nettie's Kitchen and the first thing one notices is
the comforting aroma of peanuts and chocolate. With such
an emphasis on protein, fat and health, nut butters and
chocolate permeate the entire facility. Production runs in
two shifts Monday through Friday with Saturdays for sanitation,
maintenance and any overflow production.
Ingredients and packaging delivered from the warehouse
are stored on one side of the building while production
happens on the opposite side. Ingredients are manually
weighed and scaled into batches and put on racks with
liquids and dries separated. Two 80-quart Hobart mixers
produce 45-lb batches of bar dough in three minutes. The
dough is manually transferred from the mixing bowls into
the roll line's hopper. Two rollers smooth out the dough
and create the slab of bar dough. The first part of the slab
is sliced off and added back to the hopper as rework and
then a cutter automatically slices the dough slab into the
appropriate-sized bars according to weight.
Bars are then placed on pans and racked for cooling.
Removing the bars and placing them on the pan is one of
the most arduous jobs on the production room floor. Not
only will the cooling tunnel relieve a person to do more
valuable work, but it will also cut the cooling time on the
bars from one day to 7 to 10 minutes.
During Baking & Snack's visit, the space was filled with
racks and pans, eliminating valuable production space and
producing a lot of washing for employees. Ms. Del Prete
described it as a huge bottleneck for production.
" Automating this production line will be life- and company-changing
for us, " she said. " The way we run the plant
will be different. What employees do will be different. "
Once bars are set - none of the bars are baked, so " cooling "
is more of a setting process - two employees decorate
the bars with their toppings, whether chocolate drizzle
or crumble. Nettie's Kitchen has invested in an automated
drizzler from MK Machinery to keep up with throughput
once the cooling tunnel is installed. Ms. Del Prete admitted
that, despite needing the automated drizzler to streamline
production and keep up, she would miss the variation
hand-drizzling provides.
" It was important to me that we made our bars beautiful
because we eat with our eyes first, " Ms. Del Prete said. " If
you're eating a cookies and cream bar, you want to see it. "
When the topping has set, bars are manually fed into two
Barrington flowwrappers. Metal detectors scan each bar for
any food safety issues, and then they are sent by conveyor
to packaging.
" Our main critical control point is our metal detector, "
Mr. DeLozier explained. " We don't need a kill step because
all of our raw material has already had one, so there's no
baking. It's all done at ambient, and all our ingredients are
shelf stable. "
The plant is SQF Level 2 certified with GMPs in place,
and bars are tested weekly for listeria, mold, lead and water
activity. Mr. DeLozier, Mr. Lasser and Ms. Del Prete
Left: One of the most difficult manual tasks is panning the bars,
one that the leadership team hopes to automate.
Below: A guillotine cuts the bar slab into bars to the appropriate
weight.
36 Baking & Snack December 2022 / www.bakingbusiness.com
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Baking & Snack - December 2022

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