Lake Champlain Chocolates: Tripling Output on a Sealed Fold Wrap
A Vermont chocolate maker needed hermetically sealed bar ends and three times the output. Nine months from project start to commissioning, the line runs 200 bars a minute.
Lake Champlain Chocolates has made handcrafted bars, pralines and truffles in Williston, Vermont for nearly four decades, using regional ingredients and a family-owned operation that has never traded craft for volume.
Then the shelf changed underneath them.
The problem was retail, not production
The American chocolate bar market moved from laying bars flat to standing them upright. That sounds like merchandising trivia. For a maker it is not: a bar standing on its end loses the protection a horizontal fold wrap gives it, and shelf life goes with it.
Lake Champlain needed both ends of every bar hermetically sealed. They also needed the packaging area to keep pace with a pouring line they had already upgraded, which the existing wrapping could not do.
What was installed
A LOMATIC feeding and distribution system with an integrated belt buffer, feeding an LTM-DUO twin-station fold wrapping machine.
The pairing is the point. The buffer absorbs the variation coming off the pouring line so the wrapper is presented with product at a steady pitch instead of in surges, and a wrapper that is fed steadily holds its rate across a shift. Specifying the feed and the wrapper as one system is how the line holds that output shift after shift.
What it does
The line packages 200 chocolate bars per minute, with both ends sealed, and tripled the previous capacity. From project start to commissioning took nine months.
That rate is worth sitting with. The LTM-DUO is rated at up to 215 tablets per minute, and this line runs at 200 in production, on real product, in a real plant. That is what a high-performance platform delivers when the feed and the wrapper are specified together.
In their words
Eric Lampman, President, on first seeing a comparable machine make the move from open fold wrapping to sealed full wrapping: “We were thrilled.”
John Weishaar, Manufacturing Manager: “The new system solution has been making it possible for us to hermetically seal our chocolate bars on both ends, lengthening the product shelf life.”
Why this line, and why us
LoeschPack has built fold wrapping since 1919 and builds the feeding and distribution equipment alongside it, so the buffer and the wrapper were designed to work together rather than introduced to each other on site.
Piepenbrock Packaging Technologies is the North American arm of the same family-owned group, in business since 1913. If a line like this belongs in your plant, the team that specifies it also installs it, commissions it and supports it across the United States, Canada and Mexico.
