Date Published : 30 Aug 24
Inside the Roastery
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Green Coffee Silo Storage System
The London-based roastery was expanding quickly from a 45kg roaster to a 120kg roaster. Up until Ingredient Batching Systems involvement, the operation relied heavily on manually weighing out batches of green coffee from 21.5kg to the full 45kg, anywhere from 30 to 60 times a day, in a standard roasting operation.
However, the new 120kg roaster meant weighing out by hand was unmanageable. The roaster came with a ground-based loading hopper that held 120kg of green coffee, equipped with load cells and an integrated system that would blow the batch into the roaster hopper. But getting the beans into the loading hopper was back-breaking work. The top of the hopper was 1.5m from the ground (0.7m higher than HSE legal manual handling guidelines) and operators were required to lift a 70kg sacking into it – also against legal manual handling guidelines (and impossible for some operators!).
How the bespoke system solved the issue
There are 7 silos totalling 15.8 tonnes of green coffee storage, three holding 3 tonnes, four holding 1.7 tonnes, all within a footprint of 11m x 2m. There is a single intake point, which we call a Bulk Bag Discharger, that feeds any of the silos and can receive regular 70kg jute sacks. Most importantly, though, it can receive the 1 tonne bulk bags the roastery had recently started using.
Next to the Bulk Bag Discharger intake point is an intake manifold, where the operator plugs the pipe from the discharger into one of the seven pipes leading to the silos.
A 10” touch screen is located next to the intake point and the roaster. After the bulk bag is in position and the pipe plugged into the relevant silo, the operator selects the silo on the touch screen and presses ‘transfer’. The system then sucks the green beans into the silo at 3 tonnes per hour!
Each silo sits on its own set of load cells, so the system knows the weight of each silo and gives the user an overview of stock. If the silo is full, the system will automatically stop the transfer and tell the user it is full. The operator can then decide to send the beans to a different silo or wait until the silo has the space to receive them.
We also put a ‘mini-silo’, or Receiving Vessel, above the ground-based intake hopper. This assembles the 120kg batch of green coffee from any of the silos by sucking it out the bottom. The Receiving Vessel has its own set of highly accurate load cells, so the 120kg is collected to an accuracy of less than 100 grams.
The numbers
120kg green coffee batches
4 roasts per hour
5 hours of roasting, 5 days a week
= 10 tonnes of green coffee handled per week
For every 100kg of roasted coffee produced prior to working with Ingredient Batching Systems they would move 700kg by hand. Now, for every 100kg of roasted coffee produced, 250kg is moved by hand - this is mostly post roasted product from the roaster to the packing machines, or physically putting finished bags of product into boxes to send out the door. Overall, operational manual labour reduced by up to 70%.
More time can now be spent on the quality and precision of the product, heightening overall standards.