Help us decide the ideal production amount for our soda crackers!
Hey everybody. I'm a chemical engineering student and as part of the final project of my bachelor's degree me and my group are working on the production of soda crackers from cassava, breadfruit, yam and sweet potato flour. As part of the project we need to specify how many crackers we are going to produce when we start with our project taking on count we are a new company and we cannot produce a lot of crackers from the beginning. How many do you think it will be the ideal production of crackers for our project?
Hi Joel. How are you? There is no linear answer to your question. You need to scale your project. For such a series of premises are necessary. You must start with packaging, defining the net weight of the package, as well as whether it will be a portion pack or multipack.
From there, a series of definitions need to be made. In a fictitious example, if you are going to put only one packer for 50g portion packs for example and that packer has a cruising speed of 300 packs per min, in one hour you will be able to pack 810 kg/h with 90% efficiency. From then on, dimension the oven, starting from the premise that you know the amount of heat needed to bake 1 unit of your product, and unfold it until the supply of ingredients. But nothing less than 800 kg/h would be feasible in an industrial process, perhaps that volume. Hope this helps. Kind Regards.
Hi There! Not sure if there is any right answer to your question pending your immediate need to have crackers on hand . The most important thing at the early stages of any development is to evaluate different ingredients of your recipe for both functionality and consumer liking. One will drive the other in understanding what the consumer is looking for , can you produce it on a commercial scale and lastly can you make money on it. Pending the amount of product you think you need for consumer evaluation or running your operation long enough to optimize your process parameters while making a consistent product efficiently.
From a consumer demand point of view you need to understand who are your consumers, what markets you want to be in and lastly what you can afford initially to make the product .
Dear Joel,
You'll probably be best of to do it on the lab level initially with all the downsides that it is less consistent, etc. But as you are with a few people and baking time is short. You can still produce a considerable amount if you organise your team well. Much will depend on your mixer capacity and what you can do with your sheeting machine (assuming you use it for the lamination part) If you use a small sheeter a batch size of 1-1,5 kg at a time on the sheeter is already a lot...
Good luck with your developments!
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