Biscottes Pasquier
Andrézieux-Bouthéon, France
BRIOCHE PASQUIER is a French family-owned company that processes agricultural products to manufacture and market industrial pastries.
The group has 15 plants in France, as well as 2 in Spain.
The Andrezieux facility which this winning solution is focused on specializes in the manufacturing of toasted breads.
This facility is equipped with 3 production lines.
At the beginning of the line, the dough is prepared, goes through a divider/rounder and then is conveyed to a cleaver which splits the toast in half, before entering a first two-levels oven to cook the product. The products go out on 2 infeed cooling modular belts (2970mm * 45000mm) which convey the toasts to a second oven, to roast the products this time. Then the toasts are placed on two cooling outfeed modular belts (2970mm * 26000mm), before going to the conditioning line being bagged.
The customer was running two competitor’s outfeed cooling modular belts, which were at the end of their lifetime after 8 years of good running and needed to be replaced. No particular problem had been noticed by the customer who was globally satisfied with the competitor belts.
However, we understood that every 2,5 years, the customer needed to change the sprockets because of natural wear and tear. Equipped with 72 sprockets per belt, we realized that this operation was not very efficient or cost effective for them, as they must take out the drive shaft, an operation which requires 10 hours with 2 people.
Our belt is more expensive than the competitor’s, but gives the customer some advantages;
- No more aggressive edges and therefore less retention areas and better cleanability
- True blue color instead of green-blue shade
- better passive ventilation due to a higher open surface, leading to a faster cooling, but as the speed of the line can not be modified it was not the main point.
However, the decisive selling point was the solution we proposed with our sprockets. Not only does the design give a better lifetime and better wear and tear resistance which should allow the customer to double the expected lifetime ; but also with the split sprocket design, the customer saves a lot of maintenance time as he doesn’t need to take out the drive shaft to replace the sprockets. The design of our sprockets also reduced the quantity to 50 per belt instead of 72.
We proposed our S10-36 FLT POM-HA LB with split sprockets.
The customer has run a belt for one year now. He is bringing up the second line and is planning to replace 7 other similar belts running in the plant.
Instead of 10 hours with 2 people per belt, for a demanding task where they had to remove the drive shaft, they have reduced the downtime by more than half to 4 hours with 2 people per belt.
Expectation is also to change those sprockets only once every 5 years versus current 2,5 years.
In conclusion, our belts reduced downtime, maintenance time, and most important, total cost.