Wymbs Engineering Limited based in Stockport in the Northwest of England, 30 minutes from Manchester airport, is a family business founded in the early 1980s by Brendan Wymbs for the purpose of servicing and upgrading “worn out machinery” in the bakery, sugar and chocolate confectionery industries. Wymbs Engineering has grown to occupy a major role today as manufacturers of a unique range of pressurised manifold depositing, extrusion and sheeting systems for light, aerated and delicate masses, un-aerated masses, as well as bespoke processing lines for chilled foods sector finishing doughnuts with a fresh cream swirl topping and injecting cream into éclairs and topping with a chocolate sauce for example.
Supplying some of the industry’s biggest global names with specialist, sometimes unique, depositing systems and processing lines has provided many challenges for the design team at Wymbs Engineering. Increasing capacity and depositing speeds, accuracy of deposit weight, multi-coloured combined with a centre fill depositing especially in the huge marshmallow industry, ease of cleaning and maintenance, tackling the industries ever changing mechanical and electrical standards is constantly in the background of everyday life in the design office.
Creating new standards and tailoring solutions for perhaps extraordinary requests from our customer base proves especially rewarding. With everything being produced in-house using 3D SolidWorks modelling and computer aided design capabilities, R&D laboratory testing, digital product concepts can quickly be brought to life and turned into commercial reality. A recent example can be seen in Central Asia, where our customer wanted to produce marshmallows, completely “out of the box” with extraordinary colouring, unique shapes which sometimes incorporated a centre fill of marmalade.
Marshmallow can be extruded continuously in rope form onto a starch dusted conveyor, cut into predetermined lengths following a short ageing period which thereafter might have the profile of a strawberry, melon, chicken, house, snowman, in fact the possibilities of extruding shapes from this light low-cost confection seems endless. But, while brightly coloured and “attractive” all shapes taste the same, the challenge for Wymbs was to create shape, if not by extrusion, then at least in a deposit form which looked different, was brightly coloured and tasted like nothing else in the market and so the Wymbs “burger” mallow was born, a multi-tiered deposit, combining two colours in a single deposit having a centre fill.
The Wymbs UNIVERSAL OHD overhead depositing system, a depositor having a two axis “XZ” manifold motion, a version with three axes also exists, mounts directly over a starch dusted conveyor and is fitted with two three chamber pressurised depositing manifolds, each manifold is connected to two streams of individually coloured mallow pipe lines and a third pipework connection having a stream of marmalade/jelly.
Typically, with a deposit weight of 10 to 12grs/ piece including centre fill two manifolds operating up to 30 cycles per minute the system is producing 60 rows of product per minute. The size and complexity of the deposit will determine the speed at which the system can run under optimum conditions, the numbers of nozzles across the plant will determine the overall capacity of the line and with change part manifolds or change part nozzle plates a variety of wonderful shapes, mallows with centre fill combinations, can be produced on the same line. And, when including a mallow extruder within the same project in addition to a depositor a truly versatile production line can be established.
With a healthy market established in the UK, Wymbs exports 85% of its turnover to as far afield as China, Brazil, Australia, USA, Japan, South Africa, Mexico and throughout Western & Central Europe, with most markets being supported by local representatives.
For more information please contact us via one of these methods and visit our website:
Tel: 01625 575154
Read more of the latest industry news and developments here: April 2022 Single Issue form – International Confectionery Magazine (in-confectionery.com)
Media contact
Roshini Bains,
Editor, International Confectionery
Tel: +44 (0) 1622 823 922
Email: [email protected]
