Quest ends search for new grounds

At its Bromborough factory on the Wirral, Quest International produces a variety of food flavourings and ingredients for meats, soups, dressings and snacks. Many of these products are delivered to customers in the food processing industry in powder form, but they start out as cooked hard nuggets of extruded materials, such as garlic and carrot flavourings.

To process these materials Quest has recently installed one of Kemutec's new M series KEK kibblers and a KEK 340 cone mill. Specifically designed for food industry applications, the kibbler pre-breaker combines a `U' shaped trough and rotary beater to give a better grinding capability.

The KEK kibbler can typically reduce lumps of up to 150mm in diameter down to 2 or 3mm at rates as high as 25 tonne/h with minimal fines generation. The ground product from the kibbler then flows directly to the KEK cone mill below where it is further ground into the finished powder.

`Having a kibbler and cone mill on site will save us a lot of money,' says Quest's project engineer David Hooper, `because we no longer have to send product out to be ground by third party. We estimate the equipment will have paid for itself within 24 months.'

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