Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1252179
20 / June 2020 powderbulk.com Case history | Efficiently size-reducing dates PBE A date product producer replaced its hammermill and cut production time. D ate palm trees thrive in the Coachella Valley, a region of California's Sonoran Desert, where temperatures range between 105°F and 120°F in the summer and rainfall averages one inch per year. The desert's hot, dry conditions and sandy soil are ideal for growing dates. Jewel Date Company grows, pro- cesses, packages, and ships approx- imately 8 million pounds of dates and date products each year. In addition to selling whole and diced dates, the company grinds dates into flours, granules, and powders to sell as ingredients to food manu- facturers and directly to consumers through its online store. "Dates are naturally sweet and nutritious," says John Ortiz, sales manager at Jewel. "They're a great binder, and they're stable. So, we sell a lot of dates to companies that make nutritional bars. We have sev- eral customers that use date powder as a sweetener in their teas." Harvested dates are air-dried for two days to reduce moisture con- tent from 50 percent to 7 percent, causing the dates to harden. With a moisture content greater than 7 per- cent, the dates will clump during processing. The dates are then cooled, loaded into a hopper, and forklifted to a conveyor that trans- ports them to be processed. For several years, the company had been using a hammermill to reduce the dates to the various required sizes. However, the ham- mermill lacked precise size con- trol, and its capacity was too small, resulting in long production times and low process efficiency. "It took an 8-hour shift to pro- cess 2,000 pounds of dates using the hammermill," Ortiz says. To decrease the production time and increase product quality, the company turned to Munson Machinery, a mixing, blending, and size reduction equipment manufac- turer based in Utica, NY. The sup- Jewel's processing time for 2,000 pounds of dates went from 8 hours with a hammermill to just 1 hour with the new screen classifying cutter.