Chocolate block

Gertrude Hawk Chocolates (GHC), a US chocolate manufacturer serves high volume markets that demand consistently high quality results. The company’s plant must also meet strict hygiene and safety standards, including HACCP, FDA inspection, kosher certification, physical and micro tests, as well as supporting JIT delivery schedules.

“We need to run as much as we can, as fast as we can, as long as we can,” said Bill Alfano, maintenance foreman and lead mechanic at the Dunmore, Pennsylvania-based company. “Even a single filter element clogging can disrupt production, requiring reassignment of up to 30 employees to other tasks. And quality, of course, can never be compromised.”

To achieve the right taste and texture, GHC uses filtration on all chocolate-coatings related products — typically about 70% of its product line. Previously, traditional wire filter baskets were predominantly used for chocolate coatings filtration, but these had to be removed, scraped, washed, dried, and replaced every other day before production could restart.

And, said Alfano. “When a filter would block, the chocolate pump would seize, costing us about three hours of production. If a filter basket wasn’t replaced correctly, air could be sucked through a chocolate pump.That could cause a consistency problem or problems with our tempering units.”

To resolve these issues, GHC turned to a self-cleaning filter system — an Eco Filter from Russell Finex — to eliminate the need to clean filtration baskets or change filter bags.

GHC is currently using four of these filters, which have a special spiral wiper design to continuously clean the filter element and a special valve to allow sampling of freshly filtered material without interrupting production.

“We’re saving about 60 man hours a week with [the new filters] on our 24/7 shifts,” said Alfano. “They’ve also eliminated filter blockage and pump seizures. Rather than ‘baby-sit the filters,’ our maintenance staff is now staying on top of other important tasks such as preventive maintenance.”