CASE STUDY | Round vs. Square: A Packaging Line for Fragile Snacks at Gusto Styria

The customer: a family business with a unique recipe

Gusto Styria is a smaller Austrian producer of baked potato snacks. Its Crafties Air Chips brand is sold mainly in Austria and Germany as a specialty product.

The product is not an extrudate. It is made from genuine potato dough that is rolled out, cut and baked with hot air in a continuous oven. During baking, it puffs up into a hollow pillow. Some recipes use beer instead of milk. The result is a light, crunchy and very fragile snack, and that fragility was the biggest challenge for packaging.

Starting point: topping up weights gram by gram

Switching from manual weighing to automatic dosing pays off when manual work can no longer keep up with the pace of production or the accuracy the producer needs. At Gusto Styria, both happened at once.

Workers poured the snacks onto an electronic scale, topped up each portion by hand and filled it into a paper tube. They worked carefully so the fragile product wouldn’t break, but it was laborious and time-consuming. When production grew and the customer invested in a new production line, packaging had to be automated as well.

The solution: filling two paper tubes in one step

The line takes the cooled product from production and passes the filled tubes on to closing. It works in the following steps:

• The CAB-Z feeding conveyor with VN vibratory hopper lifts the product above the combination weigher. It feeds continuously so the weigher doesn’t get overfilled.
• The CHW 210 multihead weigher assembles portions with a very small deviation from the nominal weight. It doses the left and right sides separately, and each side fills one tube.
• LUNA-T filling station: two tubes are always brought under the filling point on the continuous conveyor, and both are filled in a single cycle.
• The continuous conveyor brings in empty tubes and carries filled ones away for closing.
• The STILLER capping station applies the lids to the tubes.
• The Markem-Imaje printer marks the packaging with the best-before date and batch code.

How we stopped the fragile product from breaking during packaging

Crafties Air Chips were originally round and puffed up like little balloons. They looked impressive but were very fragile. During filling-line tests in our workshop in Vlašim, it turned out that the round pieces broke very often on their way to the weigher and into the tube.

The first tests revealed a second problem as well: portions did not always drop perfectly, so one tube ended up half-empty and the other overfilled. We therefore gradually adjusted the drop angles, chutes and discharge points until the product fell into the packaging smoothly and with as little damage as possible.

We then recommended changing the shape from round to square. After baking a test batch in the new shape, running filling trials on the line and holding joint discussions, the company owner decided to change the pillows to a 30 × 30 mm square. The change brought two benefits at once:

• Higher mechanical strength. When square pillows are dosed and dropped, the share of broken pieces fell significantly, to below 5%. 
• Less dough waste. When cutting round shapes, a lot of unused dough was left between the circles, much as when cutting out linzer cookies. Squares can be cut in a tight grid, so there is far less trimmed dough that has to be returned to production.

Installation in Austria

We built the LUNA-T filling line in Vlašim and tested it with the customer’s original product and packaging before shipping. Installation and commissioning then took place directly at the customer’s plant.

We trained German-speaking operators and maintenance staff. The manual and the control panel are in the customer’s language. The line is connected via modem, so we can handle many adjustments and diagnostics remotely.

Results

• No more manual top-up weighing. Portions are assembled by the combination weigher, and operators no longer pour product onto the scale.
• Accurate weight within tolerance in every tube. Typical deviation is just 1–2 grams, so the weigher performs very precisely. 
• Higher output. Approx. 36 tubes per minute, compared with 10 tubes per minute when packing by hand.
• Fewer broken pieces, thanks to the combination of the square shape and tuned drop paths.
• Less dough waste when cutting the square pillows.

Packing a similarly fragile product?

Send us a description or sample of your product, the type and dimensions of the packaging, and the output you need. We will test how the product behaves during dosing and propose a solution that gets it into the package intact.