Breakfast Cereal Manufacturing - Hot Cooked Cereal

Background / Requirement

 

This process started with a cooker that would discharge pieces of cooked cereal of various sizes. Some of these pieces were as big as one or two cubic feet. Following the cooker, various simple lumpbreakers were used to reduce these large sticky pieces to a size manageable by the cooled roller flaker. These lumpbreakers, however, did not produce a uniform feed material for the flakers and this resulted in problems with the size of the final flake. This company could not find a size reduction mill capable of producing 1/4" uniform particles from larger pieces of this very difficult, hot, sticky, moist cereal mass. In the existing process, particles greater than 1/4" were being fed to the flaker.

 

This resulted in extremely large flakes which caused several quality control problems:

 

• Subsequent drying ovens under-cooked the larger flakes and over-dried their edges.
• Large flakes were unacceptable so additional size reduction equipment was used to reduce their size. Size reduction at this stage caused unacceptable levels of fines and they in turn, had to be removed by an additional sifter/screener and discarded.

 

Comil Performance

 

The Comil accepts up to 10" diameter pieces of hot cooked cereal mass and produces consistent and uniform 1/4" particles. By providing the ideal particle size and shape for the flaker, the flaker produces high quality flakes which meet all quality control requirements. The Comil provides a real solution because it solves the real problem. Correcting the size of the large flakes with other mills and sifters is all unnecessary if the flaker can be supplied with the ideal particle size and shape. The Comil is flexible and allows different particle size ranges to be produced depending on particular customer requirements. Unlike other mills, the Comil does not plug-up or blind the screen, therefore, production down time is eliminated. The Comil’s clean, sanitary, low maintenance design is ideal for food processing.

 

Summary

 

Many large international breakfast cereal manufacturers have now standardized on Comils.

 

Other Comil applications in the Cereal industry are:

 

1. Deagglomeration of cooked rice, wheat, oats.

2. Reclaiming off spec. cereal such as flakes, puffs, extrusions.

3. Production of cereal crumbs for breadings and batters.

 

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