Nuts

Mixed nuts combine sizes, densities and oil contents in one recipe — the blend must reach every pack in the printed ratio. Every transfer point, every vibration and every drop separates the mix: flakes and split halves ride to the top, dense whole kernels settle at the bottom, and a filler that treats the blend as one uniform granule drifts away from the declared ratio pack after pack. The pieces are fragile as well; they chip when they fall too far or are pushed through a tight throat. Surface oil migrates onto the film at the sealing area, and an oiled seal is a weak seal. Oxygen is the last problem, which is why high-barrier film with nitrogen flush is used to slow rancidity. Dosing has to be gentle and it has to respect the recipe, so a mixed nuts filling machine is built around multi-head weighing or volumetric bucket dosing. Weighing copes with the fact that every blend has its own bulk density and that this density shifts with roast and crop; volumetric buckets are the simpler answer when one fixed recipe runs all day. Both let the product fall through short, wide, low-angle paths instead of forcing it along a screw — auger dosing belongs to powders and would grind the pieces, and piston dosing belongs to liquids and pastes. Contact parts stay smooth and easy to wipe, because roasted oil builds up on every surface it touches. Formats follow the portion. Snack-size sachets are the single-serve pack for vending, airlines, hotels, catering and sampling, and a mixed nuts sachet packaging machine is often the first line a snack brand buys. The pillow bag formed on a VFFS machine is the most common retail and foodservice format and carries the larger doses. A mixed nuts stick pack machine only makes sense at the small, uniform end of a blend, since whole kernels do not travel well through a narrow stick. Mentpack packs mixed nuts from 50 to 1000 g. Production runs on vertical VFFS machines with a single forming tube, so there is no lane multiplication: the cycle rate is the bag rate, up to 55 bags per minute and 35 to 55 in normal work. On multi-lane machines the number of lanes changes with pack width, but here one cycle is one bag whatever the width. Where a line sits in that band depends on bag length and dose weight, on how the film behaves, and on the settling time the weigher needs before each release. The VB series covers this work: VB, VB-MINI, VB-PLUS and VB-Q. The choice follows bag size, dose and the format the market asks for. Typical buyers are nut roasters and dried-fruit processors, snack brands and their private-label packers, and exporters supplying retail, vending and HORECA. Such a mixed nuts packaging machine normally also runs single-variety ranges and other free flowing granules.