Colourful candies

Four-colour depositing aims at giving the freedom to create a diversity of hard candies, which the company says can give high added value for a variety of effects including both random 'marbling' and deliberate patterns. Effects are created by using opaque or translucent colours, or a combination of the two.

The technology, for which the company says a patent is pending, involves a 'one-shot' deposit from a bank of four hoppers, each containing a different coloured candy syrup. Furthermore, mould shape is said to be unlimited.

With APV Baker​'s recent pioneering of three-component depositing, a soft centre of jam, syrup or a fat base such as chocolate can be contained within hard sweet. A key marketing benefit is the creation of two distinct textures. The technology also allows two-coloured striped candies to be produced with either a soft or hard centre.

The company says that the design can also be used to produce hard centred confectionery with contrasting flavours, such as a chocolate flavoured centre within a strawberry and cream outer. Obviously the choice of colour and flavour combinations for this system is almost limitless.

Products with two-coloured striped centres encapsulated within a clear shell, and three-coloured candies, are additional options.

The company says that it has already installed three component systems in Europe to produce centre-fill and three-colour lollipops and candies. Both solutions are being used to produced deposited lollipops as well as deposited sweets.

While centre-filled and coloured sweets can be made by traditional batch die-forming methods, they rely on hand crafting. The advantage of this system is that continuous depositing provides substantial benefits to the end product in visual impact, consistency and quality.

APV Baker adds that the quality advantages include a smoother 'mouth feel' with quicker flavour release. The nature of the depositing process creates complete control throughout the system, leading to extremely high dimensional and shape accuracy, with minimal scrap rates and high wrapping efficiency.

To support the development of new confectionery lines, the company also has its APV Baker Innovation Centre at Peterborough, UK. The Centre provides production scale equipment - which includes a range of depositing systems - and support from company process experts to help with trials and NPD.

For further information about this product please contact APV Baker​.