Shaping your day from breakfast to dinner

GEA’s machinery allows to create products for breakfast meals such as corn flakes, choco balls, honey rings, and frosty ice or snacks for quick breaks during the rest of day, like 3D and multishapes chips, potato chips or more traditional industrialized products such as papadum and golgappa.

Snack pellet technology ensures well defined shapes compared to directly expanded products. Moreover, it allows a wide choice of raw materials, since possibly all starches containing raw materials can be used, with a large choice of shaping systems: from the most classical die-cut products to sheeted ones, double and even multilayer ones. Thanks to a dedicated Dies & Moulds Department, GEA can produce extruded products of all shapes and forms, in order to satisfy even the most demanding customers.

Many cooking systems have been and are in use to produce pellet snacks from unprocessed flours and starches but the most internationally known and used is the extrusion cooking system.

Forming extruders are used to shape pellets after cooking, to make die cut products or to extrude sheets or ribbons to be shaped and cut at distance from the die. When raw materials are already pre-cooked, like for instance with potato-based products, there is no need for the cooking step: this pellet production process is referred to as cold extrusion.

All raw materials requiring cooking are processed in the first extrusion-cooking step, followed by the shaping step of the cooked mass, which can be either the abovementioned cold extrusion or any other system capable of giving a correct shape to the hot dough before the drying.

The simple principle of expansion of pellet snacks allows using a wide choice of starch based raw materials. Cereal flours are the most common ones, followed by root starches like potato and tapioca and cereal starches. A great advantage of pellet snacks technology is the possibility of making formulas with peculiar characteristics like high fiber content, multi grain or multicolored. Although the pellet production process generally includes a step to cook the starch matrix, allowing the use of raw flours and native (uncooked) starches which are cheap and widespread, some common raw materials are already cooked, such as the potato based raw materials like potato flakes and granules. Sometimes precooked or par-cooked cereal raw materials are also used. Pre-cooked materials generally do not require going through the cooking step but only the phases related to shaping and drying.

Thanks to a dedicated R&D department GEA can quickly react to customer requests, allowing to develop new products with innovative technologies. Working side by side with our customers, the R&D departments focuses on researching new raw materials and techniques to process them, studying new shapes and textures and carrying out qualitative tests.