Pizza is one of the most popular foods worldwide, and various plant constructors offer industrial pizza lines. Here is a small overview of the manufacturers and methods.
The fully automatic MCS pizza press. The presser heads can be moved out sideways for cleaning or product change
The Kaak Group can offer turnkey solutions to fabricate an industrial pizza line. Combining together various business divisions (DrieM, Daub, MCS, Benier and Kaak FPS) enables pooled expertise within the company to be utilized to create a design concept for a pizza line that can handle the variations in pizza manufacture. These turnkey lines offer capacities of up to 6,000 pieces/hour for standard pizza (or 4,000 pieces/hour for gluten-free products).
A Kaak integrated pizza production line offers all the various components needed to make pizza, including: metering, mixing, molding, proofing, baking, cooling, topping and freezing.
Mixing and make-up are provided by Benier, ovens by MCS, for example, spiral coolers by Kaak and conveyor belts by Multiparts. MCS also offers MDD mixing systems. There is also a pizza press from Italy. After the dough has been molded into balls, it is placed either on trays or onto a belt and sent to the MCS hot press. Dough balls deposited onto trays are first of all gently pressed onto the trays without any heat. The dough pieces are then put under a presser head that applies pressure and heat to press the dough up to the tray walls to create a rim on the crust. Without a tray, the dough can be pressed on a conveyor belt. Dough pieces arriving from the proofer are lined up in rows to be carried under the presser heads. Kaak goes on to say that this allows the traditional dough handling method. MCS also makes some proofer variants for these hot-pressed crusts. As well as plants to produce pizza crusts from dough balls, DrieM also makes a dough sheeter with which pizza bases are cut out by die-cutting.
The article is part of an extended feature on pizza technology, published in Baking+Biscuit International, issue 3 – 2019.
