Venezuelan company expands with Baker Perkins
Date: 08 October 2004
Cooker-extruder line to make expanded breakfast cereals
Venezuela's leading breakfast cereal producer is expanding by installing a new Baker Perkins cooker-extruder line to manufacture expanded products.
Alfonzo Rivas, a long-established family company, already runs one Baker Perkins extrusion system, plus a cornflake plant, at its factory in Turmero near Caracas. The new line will increase output of an existing range of successful Alfonzo Rivas branded cereals that compete successfully in the Venezuelan market with products from leading multi-nationals.
These include Fruty Aros - multi-coloured fruit loops; Chiky cookies - discs with chocolate sprinkle; Choco Safari - a selection of animal shapes; and ABCI-Toos - alphabet shapes. All are frosted or glazed to add value and raise the visual and flavour appeal of the product.
The decision to choose Baker Perkins to engineer this additional plant was based on confidence in the company's range of high-quality equipment and engineering expertise, plus its process know-how.
Alfonzo Rivas staff visited the Baker Perkins Innovation Centre at Peterborough in order to establish the exact process conditions required to replicate their current brands on today's high-powered, high-throughput extruders.
The new system is based around a Baker Perkins SB80 solid-barrel extruder. Twin-screw extruders give great flexibility and rapid changeover, particularly important in the highly competitive breakfast cereals market with growing consumer expectations of product variety.
The Alfonzo Rivas range will be produced directly off the twin-screw extruder, with no further processing except sugar coating and drying. The plant includes a band dryer to achieve the reduction in moisture necessary for packaging. A low solids coating plant weighs, mixes, dissolves and cooks sugar, water and glucose before transferring the syrup to a coating drum for spraying onto the product.
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