Marden Edwards Automates Nougat Wrapping

Wedgewood Handmade Confectionery of South Africa has recently installed a new Marden Edwards S4B100FF automatic overwrapping machine. Wedgewood is a young family company which starting producing high quality nougat biscuit bars in the family kitchen eight years ago. 

Originally, the naked nougat bars were wrapped by hand but as the business became more successful and demand grew a fully automated system was required.

With the help of Marden Edwards South African agent, Pakmatic, a specification was drawn up for a machine to wrap at 35 cycles per minute and to be able to cope with the variations in product size that can be expected with a hand made product. Utilising their own expert knowledge of producing nougat, Wedgewood manufactured the product feeding system themselves which they integrated into the overwrapper.

Based on extensive experience of overwrapping chocolates and confectionery, as well as other ‘naked’ food products such as cake, Marden Edwards provided a machine suited to the sticky and irregular shaped nature of nougat. Of particular concern was the nuts within the nougat bar, which often protruded from the bar itself.

John Walter, Project Engineer for Wedgewood, said, “I liked the openness and simplicity of the Marden Edwards over wrapping system. It enabled me to easily link the machine into my production line. I found the technical support and assistance at Marden Edwards very helpful as we commissioned the system and went from factory trials to full scale production. The system is able to cope with any pack size variation but still produces a really high quality wrap”.

The flexibility of the machine has proved helpful in other ways. A cartoned, presentation five bar multipack is also being wrapped on the same machine when it is not required for the individual bars.