Customized production

Pizza is one of the most popular foods worldwide, and various plant constructors offer industrial pizza lines. Here is a small overview of the manufacturers and methods.

P izza can be produced to a customer’s specification to comply with almost all personal preferences and dietary or religious restrictions. A pizza can also be adapted to a series of regional preferences. In addition there are variations of pizzas and pizza-like snacks. Industrial pizza line manufacturers offer a very wide variety of solutions and processes. Here is a small, albeit incomplete, overview of plant constructors and processes.

According to the manufacturer, FRITSCH pizza lines start with a dough sheeting line operating according to the

FRITSCH SoftProcessing © method to carefully shape the dough into a dough sheet while retaining the structure of soft doughs. For this, the SoftProcessing © method uses a satellite head. The satellite head has eight rollers with a non-stick coating, and moves in the same direction as the dough sheet. Each of the eight rollers moves in the opposite direction to the dough sheet. After the dough has been reduced to the required dough sheet thickness, and depending on the process, the dough can go into the proofer, for example. To create a slightly irregular shape, a poking roller can be used to poke the dough after proofing, thus simulating manual make-up. A FRITSCH IMPRESSA pizza line can be used to produce Italian pizza, American pizza, calzones and flatbreads.

Generally speaking, there are two ways to produce pizza crusts, either from a doughball or by cutting out on a dough sheeting line.

FRITSCH specializes in dough make-up, while FRITSCH Bakery Systems also offers to plan entire pizza lines extending beyond the dough sheeter line. FRITSCH Bakery Systems acts as a single provider to plan the design concept and coordinate the suppliers of the ovens, freezers and packing plants to offer a turnkey solution for the whole pizza line.

The Kaak Group can also offer turnkey solutions to fabricate an industrial pizza line. Combining together various business divisions (DrieM, Daub, MCS, Benier and Kaak FPS) enables pooled expertise within the company to be utilized to create a design concept for a pizza line that can handle the variations

Versatility Reliability Quality

VMI offers state-of-the-art mixing technologies to meet the varied requirements of the baking industry in pizza manufacture. These turnkey lines offer capacities of up to 6,000 pieces/hour for standard pizza (or 4,000 pieces/ hour for gluten-free products).

A Kaak integrated pizza production line offers all the various components needed to make pizza, including: metering, mixing, molding, proofing, baking, cooling, topping and freezing.

Mixing and make-up are provided by Benier, ovens by MCS, for example, spiral coolers by Kaak and conveyor belts by Multiparts. MCS also offers MDD mixing systems. There is also a pizza press from Italy. After the dough has been molded into balls, it is placed either on trays or onto a belt and sent to the MCS hot press. Dough balls deposited onto trays are first of all gently pressed onto the trays without any heat. The dough pieces are then put under a presser head that applies pressure and heat to press the dough up to the tray walls to create a rim on the crust. Without a tray, the dough can be pressed on a conveyor belt. Dough pieces arriving from the proofer are lined up in rows to be carried under the presser heads. Kaak goes on to say that this allows the traditional dough handling method. MCS also makes some proofer variants for these hot-pressed crusts. As well as plants to produce pizza crusts from dough balls, DrieM also makes a dough sheeter with which pizza bases are cut out by die-cutting.

The biggest pizza line fabricated by AMF Tromp was installed in the USA and produced 100,000 pizza crusts per hour. The Group supplies customized lines with which the customer can choose whether his pizza crust is to be produced either from a dough ball or from a dough sheet. For this, as the company explained, the Tromp dough sheeter line offers gentle dough handling that retains the dough’s structure, consistency and volume.

AMF Tromp uses a dough divider for crusts made from a dough ball. This offers high weight accuracy and a greater capacity than a dough sheeter plant.

Various topping and decorating systems are offered to apply ingredients such as cheese, meat and vegetables. Excess ingredients are recycled to the ingredients cone. AMF Tromp proofer systems are also tailor-made. The oven designs can be equally customer-specific. Thus AMF Tromp offers an integrated pizza solution through partnerships with AMF, AMF Den Boer and Reading Bakery Systems.

Rademaker offers a pizza line capable of producing pizzas in various shapes and sizes, as well as alternative products or variants such as pizza baguettes and pizza sticks. The Rademaker pizza line can process between 500 kg and 6,500 kg/hour of dough. In this respect the company specializes in dough sheeter technology. With a working width of 600 to 1,600 mm, the dough sheeter line provides the flexibility needed to manufacture a wide range of products and shapes. Capacities depend on the product and dough thickness. Proofer cabinets can be set up “in line” if necessary, to proof dough sheets before cutting out the product. Rademaker’s pizza topping solution is also said to be a modular system that guarantees the flexibility and quick changeover needed to produce a pizza topped with tomato sauce, vegetables, cheese, meat and other toppings. This allows the plant constructor to offer customized solutions for pizza production. +++