Company: Mecatherm

Website: www.mecatherm.fr/en_index-en.html

Equipment Snapshot: MECATHERM is pleased to announce the launch of MECAPATISSERIE, a production line dedicated to patisserie products. With this new line, MECATHERM’s acknowledged production line baking expertise is now available for patisserie manufacturers with a solution ensuring product quality, industrial performance and flexibility to meet the new challenges imposed by the market.

With more than 8,000 product launches worldwide every year, the particularly diverse industrial patisserie market is constantly changing. Satisfying the expectations of consumers who are more and more knowledgeable and demanding is all the more important for manufacturers since these are products with high added value. Patisserie products may represent only 6 percent of the bakery market in volume but they represent 22 percent in value. This means that manufacturers must intensify their efforts to innovate and offer products with unique characteristics. They must constantly innovate, by proposing new flavors but also by offering a variety of formats and packaging or by adapting their recipes to meet the growing demand for "Clean Label" products.

To adapt to demand and market trends, manufacturers face three major challenges:

• Flexibility, to be able to easily innovate, produce a wide variety of products, and to rapidly get the product to market. Flexibility is also a lever to respond to seasonality, a particular characteristic of the patisserie market where a significant part of the consumption is traditionally associated with celebrations or feasts.
• Product quality, with high-precision baking guaranteeing perfect and homogeneous products, and the highest levels of hygiene throughout the process.
• Industrial performance, with necessary profitability requiring minimal product losses and optimized operation of the production line.

MECATHERM has designed MECAPATISSERIE line to respond to these three challenges.

MECAPATISSERIE line consists of a baking circuit and a cooling and freezing circuit. Equipment from partners can be integrated upstream for mixing and dosing of ingredients, downstream for packaging, or for personalization at any stage of the process. This baking system consists of the M-TA oven with flexible technology, an MVD cooler including a buffer system and an MVS freezer with dual infeed, as well as depanning solutions that can accommodate several types of tools (needles, vacuum, fingers).

To minimize the risk of contamination as products leave the baking area, and to guarantee the best hygienic conditions, MECAPATISSERIE line has a separate cooling circuit (completely independent from the baking circuit) as well as dedicated cooling trays. The products are removed from the baking trays and then placed on cooling trays just after leaving the oven, avoiding the risk of contamination in this sensitive area. The line is also equipped with a tray washer, which can clean the baking trays as well as the cooling supports.

Finally, the line is equipped with a storage gantry for automatic trays changeovers. M-Plan and M-Pilot management tools are also incorporated to optimize the productivity and efficiency of the line.

Patisserie products are made from ingredients that are particularly delicate and expensive to produce. It is therefore essential for manufacturers to reduce product losses as much as possible, to optimize production and to control costs. MECAPATISSERIE integrates the concept of industrial performance and quality throughout the production line.

MECAPATISSERIE line has been designed so that manufacturers can produce a wide range of patisserie products, simple or composed, fresh or frozen, in multiple configurations. At each stage of production, MECAPATISSERIE line allows for the integration of several stages of product customization, with the guarantee of optimizing productivity.

M-TA oven is the centerpiece of this line as it can handle a wide range of recipes and ensure the high-precision baking required for patisserie products. The precision of the M-TA oven means perfect production of delicate products with a homogeneous result. Multiple adjustments and remarkably precise baking mean that tailor-made results can be obtained. The compact and independent baking zones, the multiple combinations of heating modes associating convection and radiation and the precise management of air flows make the M-TA oven particularly suitable and effective for the production of all patisserie products, from muffins to macarons and pies.

After baking, the cooling circuit is fitted with a buffer where products leaving the oven are stored in case the production line downstream of the cooler is stopped. Therefore, MVD cooler and its integrated buffer increase production efficiency and reduce product losses.

The MVS freezer used in MECAPATISSERIE line has a dual infeed. Integrated in the production line, it can receive products coming from the line or can be used independently i.e. as a stand-alone equipment. This system of dual infeed increases possible options. For example, the line allows to freeze simple products coming from the cooler, or alternatively, composed products which will require additional assembling operations, or even patisserie products from another line.

MECAPATISSERIE has effective production management tools:

• M-Plan which simulates and optimizes production scenarios to obtain the best line availability rate and the shortest changeover times. Manufacturers can significantly improve the performance of the line by lining up products in the best possible sequence;
• M-Pilot, an intuitive interface that facilitates operation, production monitoring and traceability on the line.

All of these solutions bring the manufacturer significant gains in productivity, but also the flexibility to deal with product diversity.

“Our expertise in baking is a strength on which we have to develop our first production line exclusively dedicated to patisserie products. With the performance and precision of our M-TA oven, we have combined equipment to offer a particularly flexible, efficient, performant and high-quality solution. It allows our customers to adapt to fast-moving patisserie market in the best possible conditions,” said François Retailleau, lines product manager at MECATHERM.