The Manufacturing Confectioner • September 2011 79

➤

Chocolate Moulding —Process and EquipmentThe number and type of chocolate-moulding step processes willdetermine the final product shape, composition and quality.

Moreno RoncatoCarle & Montanari SpA

Moreno Roncato ismanaging director ofCarle & MontanariSpA and had servedas director of opera-tions at Carle & Mon-tanari USA since1999. Prior workexperience includesengineering and salesmanagement posi-tions with manufac-turers of industrialequipment for thetextile and plasticindustries.

According to the book Chocolate,Cocoa, and Confectionery by Bernard

W. Minifie, moulding is “…the casting ofchocolate into moulds … followed by cool-ing and demoulding….” This is a good, intu-itive definition explaining how the mould-ing process is composed of a sequence ofsteps or operations producing perfectlyformed chocolate products.

However, an efficient moulding processproducing good-quality products requiresmore operations than casting, cooling anddemoulding. We will discuss the sequenceof process steps, and then the specific oper-ations. Some of these steps are fundamen-tal and are part of any type of mouldingprocess; others are specific to some type ofmoulding.

Before discussing the steps of the mouldingprocess, we need to identify the various typesof processes by identifying the types of prod-ucts that are produced and the characteris-tics of the materials used to make them.

TYPES OF MOULDED PRODUCTS

We can identify several different types ofmoulding products (Figure 1). The mainones follow:

Solid The product is moulded using onlychocolate.

Inclusions The product is moulded usingchocolate and inclusions. The inclusions canbe deposited into the moulds before deposit-ing the chocolate, they can be mixed with thechocolate before depositing or they can bedeposited into the mould after the chocolate.In this last case, backing off of the productmay or may not be required (by backing offwe mean the deposit of a layer of chocolateto form the bottom of the product).

Cookies and wafers Chocolate is depositedfirst into the mould cavity and then cookiesor wafers are pressed into it. Backing off ofthe chocolate may or may not be required.

Chocolates with centers (fat based, sugarbased, liquid, etc.) This can be done by code-positing of shell and centers (one-shot, triple-shot, multishot, etc.) or center depositinginto a shell. Center depositing can be doneby traditional shell forming or cold-matrix

Figure 1

Types of Moulded Products

Back to Basics—Finished Chocolate to Finished Products