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14/11/2012

 

In the past every oven we’ve had has been a linear oven, which can be quite long and take up a lot of floor space. For example, most recent linear oven was a 65 foot converted bakery oven. By the time you put an entrance into it and an exit out of it, you pretty easily eat up 100 feet of room space. 

 

The spiral oven is much more efficient and a lot smaller than a conventional linear oven. Some popular 8-foot (cube) mini-spiral oven has a 150-foot belt, and it is equivalent of a 40-foot long oven. A 16-foot spiral oven, such as the one we delivered to Intevation, saves an enormous amount of floor space and can replace several linear ovens.

 

Cooking at temperatures up to 500 degrees (F), spiral ovens are rated at up to four times the efficiency of thermal oil ovens cooking the same product. A spiral oven uses a high-velocity fan to force the flow down through the oven in a uniform 360-degree pattern. Air flows evenly around all sides of the oven, and temperatures are consistent across the full width of each conveyor tier, from top to bottom of the oven.

 

To accommodate escalating production demands, at previous enterprise we had to resort to placing more layers of potatoes in each basket as it was sent through the linear oven, and  turning up the temperature higher and higher. 

 

Although it served the purpose at the time, but it didn’t give us the quality of product we have now, or the controls we have now.  It also wasn’t as energy efficient.

 

Furthermore, the linear oven required an employee to add the potatoes into baskets by hand, before pushing each basket into the oven.  At that point, the product moved through on a conveyor system, but it cost Intevation additional money for personnel – particularly as production demands increased.

 

With the spiral oven, potatoes are baked individually.  After the potatoes are washed, graded, and inspected for quality, they feed automatically in and out of the oven.

 

By putting a spiral oven into our facility, we’ve saved quite a bit of real estate, and yet have attained improved flexibility, capacity and throughput.  5 people run our entire operation now, when in the past it took about 8 people.

 

 

When we started looking around we saw that Unitherm had equipment that appealed to us, not only because of its capacity and flexibility, but also its controls.  The oven is designed so you can control the air and the cooking moisture required for a given recipe.  Our spiral oven also provides a variable speed control, according to the chain length and timing. Also, the controls are simple. And there are a lot of other features that affected our choice.

 

 

Spiral ovens are designed to occupy a much smaller footprint than the more traditional linear oven. At the tame time, spiral ovens are highly efficient, enabling high-capacity model users to cook up to 10,000 pounds of finished products per hour.

 

The spiral oven purchased by Intevation, a medium size in Unitherm’s product offering, is a 16-foot cube containing 350 feet of belt.  Despite the small footprint, this high-capacity spiral oven enables Intevation to produce large quantities of various items in the same oven.