food Marketing - Technology 6/2023

Processing
Zarecki Grows with a Sweet New Line
When it comes to dehydrated fruit,
Zarecki is the new kid on the block.
Launched in 2017, their production
facility in Sieradz, Poland utilizes the
most modern manufacturing practices
to process their products efficiently
and with the highest quality standards.
Zarecki processes over 6,000 metric
tons of fresh fruit every year, which are
sold as dehydrated fruit ingredients to
food processors across Europe who
make breakfast cereals, snack bars,
confectionaries, baked goods and
more.
When expanding their business and
introducing new products to the market
last year, Zarecki designed and built a
new line to sweeten and dehydrate
sour cherries, black currants and
both cultivated and wild blueberries.
Requiring a series of conveyors that
could de-juice, spread product and
more, they turned to Key Technology
and selected five specialized Impulse®
conveyors.
Specialized equipment for a
challenging application
“Our number one goal when selecting
vibratory conveyers was protecting
our product quality. These shakers
are installed after infusion and before
the dryer, when the fruit is as delicate
as jellyfish. Transporting this fragile
product on a belt conveyor would
be a mistake,” said Marcin Sosnicki,
Managing Director at Zarecki. “It takes
unique equipment and great expertise
to design the right product handling
system for this challenging section of
the processing line.”
“We also needed our conveyor
system to handle a wide variety of
different products with fast and easy
changeovers,” said Sosnicki. “You’d
be surprised how differently a cherry
behaves from a blueberry. Plus, we
also handle our apple products on this
line for part of the year.”
Production versatility and high speeds
Zarecki has two processing lines – one
for apples and the new one primarily
for all their other fruit – which come
together to share a single dryer.
Running at high speeds of up to two
metric tons of fruit per hour, the new
line sweetens cherries, currants and/
or blueberries with infusion tumblers,
which discharge the syrupy product
into a flume system. A series of three
Impulse conveyors, one de-syruping
and two de-juicing, gently drain the
syrup and juice from the product as it
is run over product-specific screens.
Next, an Impulse transfer conveyor
directs the product 90-degrees around
a corner to an Impulse spreading
conveyor, which prepares the product
for optimal presentation to the dryer’s
infeed system.
When the new line runs apples, the
product bypasses the de-syruping
shaker and instead moves from the
apple preparation line directly to the
first de-juicing shaker, since the apples
are not infused.
“Key has a lot of experience with
different kinds of food processing
facilities around the world – that deep
expertise contributes to their creativity
in solving difficult production problems.
They were able to advise us on what
would work best for our challenging
application,” said Sosnicki. “The Key
team took extra steps to research and
test our products before presenting
us with their recommendations.
18 food Marketing & Technology • December 2023