Sanitation and maintenance continue to be on the radar for bakers in all their equipment decisions. Mixers tend to be quite hardy, but more open designs and attention to wear-prone areas have made them even easier to clean and maintain.

“Sanitation is certainly the driving force behind the frame design, although we have also made the bowl stronger and the cooling more efficient in the new OFM series.  The frame design is also compatible with all the various Trough Hoist systems, both manual and fully-automatic,” said Bruce Campbell, vice-president, AMF Bakery Systems, of the company’s newly designed horizontal mixer. AMF displayed the open-frame design at the International Baking Industry Exposition (IBIE) 2013. It features a stainless-steel tubing frame to house the bowl and the drive. 

These open frames are all about providing access for cleaning and maintenance. “Access to the wear parts is better in the open-frame mixer,” said Damian Morabito, president, Topos Mondial. Open design makes equipment easier not only to clean but also to maintain, minimizing down time. Three of Topos Mondial’s new mixers shown at IBIE incorporated open-frame design: the three-roller-bar mixer, the double-sigma mixer and single-sigma mixer.

While open-frame design might make wear parts easy to change out and maintain, Shaffer, a Bundy Baking Solutions company, has also taken steps to address wear altogether by using composite material at points of the machine that see a lot of wear such as the tilting mechanism. “In the past, our design used metal-on-metal, and you always had to have a grease ring in there,” said Terry Bartsch, vice-president of sales, Shaffer. With a composite material, the grease is no longer necessary because the material wears better than metal-on-metal. Eliminating grease points is also good for sanitation.

Making mixers easier to clean and maintain also lengthens these machines’ already long lives.