"Lao Zhang, come and take a look at this new guy!" When the equipment was debugged last month, the operator Xiao Li stared at the monitoring screen. On the screen, handmade chocolates shaped like shells are traveling on the conveyor belt at a speed of 60 pieces per minute. The gold foil paper is automatically shaped and wrapped in a constant temperature environment of 28¡æ, and even the wrinkles retain the charm of handmade packaging by craftsmen. This is the third-generation chocolate packaging machine we have just put into production. The temperature control system alone has been iterated seven times.
The old masters who have been in this industry for more than 20 years know that chocolate packaging is a delicate job of "dancing on the tip of a knife". Five years ago, when we were doing OEM for a high-end Belgian brand, their technical director held up melted chocolate and argued with us: "The sealing temperature of your equipment must be controlled within ±0.5¡æ fluctuation, otherwise the cocoa butter will precipitate and ruin the texture." This sentence was like a thorn in our hearts, and it also gave birth to the current precision temperature control system - through real-time monitoring by sixteen infrared sensors, combined with an air bath heat sealing device, the temperature difference was reduced to ±0.3¡æ.
The most commendable thing about this chocolate packaging machine is the "handmade feeling" packaging technology. Before Christmas last year, a popular chocolate workshop in Shanghai was eager to produce Christmas tree-shaped gift boxes. Traditional equipment cannot wrap this kind of special-shaped chocolate packaging with sharp corners. Our engineers added flexible silicone finger sleeves to the robot hand, and with the visual positioning system, they raised the packaging qualification rate from 68% to 95%. When the boss lady inspected the product, she looked at it for a long time with a magnifying glass: "This machine wraps more carefully than the little girl in my store."
Recently, what impressed me, an old technician, was the newly developed "memory alloy mold". In the past, the most troublesome thing about changing production lines was changing molds, especially when dealing with special-shaped chocolate packaging of different sizes. It took two or three hours to adjust them. Now the operator selects the product model on the control screen, and the mold automatically deforms and adapts, and the switching time is compressed to 20 minutes. During the commissioning last week, the factory manager specially took a piece of Cadbury to test it. From thin chocolate to sandwich squares, the equipment switched smoothly.
Energy consumption was once the "Achilles heel" of chocolate packaging machines. I remember that when the first generation of equipment was working, the workshop temperature had to be controlled below 18¡æ, and the refrigeration equipment alone consumed thousands of kilowatt-hours of electricity every day. The current third-generation model adopts a dual-circulation cooling system, which can operate stably even in the normal temperature environment of the workshop. When the Guangdong customer accepted it last month, the workshop director pointed to the electric meter and laughed: "It saves 40% of electricity compared to the old equipment, and you don't have to wear a cotton jacket to work in summer."
Flexible production capacity is the real skill. Last quarter, we made a chocolate packaging machine for a chain brand. The same production line can package 30 grams of handmade truffle chocolate and 200 grams of holiday sharing packs. The robotic arm will automatically adjust the gripping force according to the volume of the chocolate, and can also intelligently match the gas ratio when filling with nitrogen. After watching the test process, the customer's technical director half-jokingly said: "This equipment should be renamed Chocolate Transformers."
Maintenance convenience is the direction of our breakthrough. The new equipment has reduced the number of vulnerable parts from the original 32 to 12, and the key parts are designed as quick-release structures. Last month, a customer in Inner Mongolia encountered a jam in the conveyor belt, and they replaced the module in five minutes with video guidance. The old master sighed on the phone: "It used to take half a day to remove a heat seal head, but now it is as simple as changing a printer cartridge."
Watching the young technicians in the monitoring room skillfully operate the chocolate packaging machine, I can't help but think of the days when I followed the master to adjust the old packaging machine 20 years ago. At that time, three people had to watch when packaging a piece of chocolate. The temperature was slightly higher and the mold would stick, and the humidity would frost again. Nowadays, the intelligent dehumidification system built into the equipment can control the humidity fluctuation in the workshop within 3%, which was unimaginable in the past.
Recently, the R&D department is working on a new topic - how to make the chocolate packaging machine identify the cocoa content. The hardness of chocolates with different ratios is obviously different, which puts forward new requirements for the gripping strength. The seventh-generation manipulator trial-produced last week can automatically adjust the clamping parameters through laser scanning. The factory director made a decision at the project meeting: "Next year, this function will be made standard. Our chocolate packaging machine must understand chocolate better than human hands."
From customer feedback, the third-generation chocolate packaging machine has truly solved the pain points of the industry. The production supervisor of a certain generation factory revealed that their defective rate has dropped from 0.8% to 0.3%, and the packaging materials alone save more than 100,000 yuan per month. What makes me even more proud is that more and more handmade chocolate workshops have begun to purchase our equipment, which not only retains the handmade temperature, but also realizes the possibility of mass production - this is probably the charm of intelligent manufacturing.
