Conrad Schulte & Co Automation Upgrade, Germany

Conrad Schulte GmbH and Co KG is one of the leading biscuit and pastry manufacturers in Germany, with an operation that employs about 250 people at its Reitberg facility.

The company began producing biscuits and pastry products in 1884 as a village bakery and came to prominence just before the First World War. It is now an international name with a wide range of products including piped biscuits, puff pastry, Florentine pastry, German-style cookies, Christmas cookies, dominoes, checkerboard cookies, gingerbread, butter cookies, sponge cakes, curd biscuits, wafer biscuits and macaroons.

While the company has retained traditional manufacturing and baking methods (their motto is "bakery tradition which you can taste"), with a range of recipes dating back to its origins, a need was identified in late 2008 to automate some of their processes and increase production efficiency while minimising downtime. To achieve this Schulte approached Schüco Design Industrial Automation and explored the possibility of introducing new conveyor technology.

Automation

The cakes and pastries baked at the Reitberg facility are delicate and must be handled with care throughout the baking and packing process. The products are baked in ovens and then need to be cooled using a cooling tunnel before being transported via a conveyor belt to the packing area, where they are packed into blister packs by hand before being hermetically sealed and secondary packed for shipping.

In order to increase the efficiency of these processes Conrad Schulte & Co chose a modular CS stretch line (SL) slat band conveyor system, which was designed for its bespoke production lines. The modular aluminium system has horizontal and vertical line units, allowing any point in the factory to be reached.

The system, the Schüco CS 090 SL, is ideal for this type of product as it is a 90mm-wide conveyor line that is able to accommodate product widths of 20mm to 200mm. One of the main advantages of the SL system is that it is designed to compensate for the stretch in the chain that occurs during operation, meaning the chain does not have to be shortened and machine downtime can be avoided.

The stretch effect also reduces friction and leads to quiet operation and good gliding characteristics at speeds in excess of 80 metres per minute. The slat-band chains and glide rails reduce friction, which decreases the chain traction force and in turn reduces the number of motors required (the system can pull 200kg at once).

The meandering conveyor system also incorporates a minimal curve radius, allowing narrow curves with only small gaps, which increases safety for production assistants and lowers the chance of production problems.

The system can be changed in a short time to incorporate the packing of different products. With a range of biscuits / cookies and pastries coming from the cooling tunnel, sometimes selection packs must be packed into blister packs.

To meet this requirement packing stations are set up to deliver single products while the blister packs travel past on the conveyor to be filled with products from each station.

In these situations the modular nature of the system is a great advantage as it allows product cooling and packing to be tailored to each stock keeping unit, meaning products can be packed carefully (with minimum breakages) and quickly (for maximum keeping qualities).