Designing an automated pizza production line can make or break your ability to achieve long-term success. Even when it comes to basic equipment like Quantum circle placers. After all, your product will only be as good as your process, especially in frozen pizza manufacturing, where every step affects the final result.
In this article, we will discuss how Quantum circle placers stand out from conventional dough feed systems. We will also discuss who needs dough conveying systems and the downside of not using the right type of system for this process.
Dough Conveying Systems: What Are Circle Placers?
Frozen pizza manufacturing consists of many different steps that all contribute to creating reliable and high-quality frozen pizzas. Every step is very important, including the very initial steps involving dough conveying systems.
Circle placers are just one part of this process, as they automate the job of placing the corrugated cardboard placemats onto the conveying system. The corrugated cardboard is what the pizza crust will sit on as it is topped with sauce and pizza toppings, partially baked, flash frozen, and packaged.
The purpose of the corrugated cardboard is to make sure the pizza crust is aligned and that all of the toppings are aligned. It also provides the crust with stability until it can be flash frozen.
Who Needs Circle Placers?
If you are using manual labor to place the corrugated cardboard onto your conveyor system, you may need to upgrade to a circle placer. Circle placers are an essential piece of equipment, whether you are a small, mid-sized, or large pizza manufacturing company.
Circle placers help you bypass many common quality issues, such as misaligned toppings, ingredient waste, and poorly packaged pizzas. This equipment will also drastically improve your ability to scale production since you won’t have a manual labor bottleneck. For instance, our circle placers at Quantum can achieve speeds as high as 180 circles per minute, which would be impossible to do with a team of employees. Frozen pizza manufacturers need to invest in this equipment to achieve long-term growth.
How the Dough Feed Systems at Quantum Stand Out
Quantum circle placers play an essential role in creating high-quality frozen pizzas that your consumers know and trust. At Quantum, our circle placers outperform conventional dough systems with our easy-to-use design and advanced automated technology.
When you invest in Quantum circle placers, you’ll have the option of choosing between two different circle placer models. Both models can place as many as 180 corrugated cardboard circles on the conveyor belt per minute. Both models can also handle different cardboard sizes and shapes, including round, square, and rectangular cardboard placemats.
Quantum circle placers offer variable speeds, allowing you to adjust them depending on the size of your pizza manufacturing company. Our circle placers also use precision electric drive motor technology, providing consistency and reliability.
In addition to these useful features, all of our equipment is highly compatible, allowing you to build and integrate an efficient automated pizza line.
Pizza Crust Production: Downsides to Not Using Circle Placers
If you want to improve pizza crust production, you need to have the right equipment. Not adding circle placers to your pizza line can come with many downsides that would end up far outweighing the initial expense. You have to take into account that this is one of the very first steps of the pizza-making process, which means that it impacts every other step.
Here are some examples of the downsides you may experience if you are not using an automated circle placer.
Misaligned Toppings
The circle placer is what helps to ensure the corrugated cardboard is in the right place so that the pizza crust can be lined up. This is ultimately what helps your topping applicators to apply pizza toppings in an even and consistent way. If your pizza crust isn’t lined up with the corrugated cardboard, the toppings will also be misaligned.
Misaligned toppings negatively impact the quality of the final product and the consumer’s experience. Also, this directly contributes to ingredient waste, especially if you aren’t using a reclaim system. This issue can even impact the taste of the final product if certain pizzas get too many toppings, while others don’t get enough.
Misaligned Sauce
Like misaligned toppings, misaligned pizza sauce is also a significant issue in pizza crust production. Misaligned sauce can result in the sauce going over the edges of the pizza crust. This damages the quality of the final product. If the sauce spills over the pizza crust, it is more likely to become freezer-burned. It may also burn when baked later on. Misaligned pizza sauce can contribute to the sauce being wasted as well. It may even result in the entire pizza needing to be thrown out.
Mishapen Pizzas
Before the pizza dough is flash frozen, it is very delicate and flexible. The corrugated cardboard placemat is there to provide some stability and to keep the dough in place throughout the manufacturing process. If the dough is not centered on the corrugated cardboard, it is very likely to become misshapen before being flash frozen. Misshapen pizzas often have to be thrown out, which can quickly start to eat into your profit margins.
Poor Quality Packaging
The very last step of the pizza manufacturing process is packaging the frozen pizzas. Unfortunately, if you aren’t using a circle placer, it could negatively impact how well the pizzas are packaged.
If they aren’t lined up correctly, it could result in the packaging not being completely sealed, making the frozen pizza unsafe to consume. Or, it could result in packaging overlap, creating an unappealing look and negatively impacting the consumer’s experience.
Design an Automated Pizza Production Line With Quantum
Are you ready to design an automated pizza production line with Quantum circle placers? At Quantum, we provide top-of-the-line frozen pizza manufacturing equipment to help you stand out. All of our equipment is specifically designed to improve reproducibility, quality, and speed. Contact our team today to learn more about our dough feed systems.