Chocolate Manufacturer

Our client is a worldwide producer of raw chocolate ingredients, starting from the cacao bean to chocolate pellets. In the production process, cacao beans are ground and cut. As a worldwide shipper of raw chocolate ingredients, a high production volume is essential to deliver sufficient quantity for their clients. Moreover, as this is a food product with strict regulations, the production process cannot allow for any impurities or quality issues.

With their previous grinding knives, a replacement was needed every week. This leads to an overall downtime of 150 hours per year per production line. Multiplied with the number of production lines, this is a loss of 600 hours of production. On top of that, due to wear of the knives, impurities often polluted the production, which led to the need to discard twenty entire batches of chocolate ingredients.

When ICC came in, we focused on two things: minimize the wear due to production and minimize loose particles polluting the production. As a result of our qualitative knives, we were able to reduce the number of replacements to once per half year, leading to a yearly downtime of only 3 hours per year. Due to this, our client was able to increase yearly production by 12,000 tonnes of raw chocolate ingredients.

Secondly, due to the minimal pollution of our knives, every batch that was tested showed no sign of pollution above the required legal threshold.

By now, ICC has become the preferred partner to supply knives for more than ten years.