What Exactly is the Difference?

Our depositor is fundamentally different from most chocolate depositing units.  From what we have seen no other manufacturer uses what we have dubbed a Channel Based design.  Selmi, FBM, Pomati, Chocolate World and Gami, to name a few, all use what we call a Cavity Based design. Essentially you have two halves that when screwed together create a cavity,  most manufactures will also have a baffle(s) inside the cavity to try and make the flow more uniform.   

With the help of some engineering tools (Computational Fluid Dynamics) we create a series of channels and manifolds that uniformly supply chocolate to each nozzle.  We call this the Channel Plate,  the Top Plate (solid black in the pictures)  is then placed on top of the Channel Plate and fixed down using 4 large threaded knobs.  Those two pieces essentially make a bunch of tubes that run to each nozzle.  On the top side of the Top Plate there is a supply port with a ~4mm filter (perforated square).  Then finally the adaptor plate goes over the Filter.   This Adaptor Plate allows us to essentially attach to any continuous tempering machine simply by changing the fitting that attaches to it.   The result is a depositor that produce bars that are within +/-1 gm on a mold (I.E 60 62 60).  Some of the other benefits: much less chocolate gets trapped in the depositor after a molding session something like 100 gms as opposed to the 1000-1500 in other depositors, so cleaning is much easier.  Because the chocolate is flowing though channels evenly it is continuously pushed out and there are no pockets inside the depositor were chocolate can become trapped, allowed to cool, and go out of temper.  The unit is light weight, about 60% the weight of a Selmi unit.  The mold holder rails are attached to the unit which makes lining the mold up much easier. 

Now we can’t speak for all units because we have not had a chance to see them all, but we can tell you unequivocally that if it uses a cavity and baffles it will never be able to produce bars with the same weight uniformity as the FE-Depositor.

Now we personally have not operated the unit extensively but some of our beta testers put it though its paces,  the folks at BOHO chocolate did a little experiment to see how fast they could mold if they really pushed themselves and they were able to do 120 molds (360 bars)  in 17 mins, all within the +/-1 gm weight.  No recycling bars or shipping bars that are overweight.

So why spend several thousand dollars on a unit?  If you have ever produced bars that are over weight then it should really be an easy answer.  With the volume of bars some folks do in a year it would probably take less than a year recover the cost of the depositor. say you do 100,000 bars a year and 10% of those bars are 5 grams heavy. That’s 50,000 grams of chocolate or ~ 980 bars that you essentially gave away or did not get paid for.  Now with the depositor your down to only two grams heavy (max) or 390 bars. 980*$5 = $4900 ,  390 *$5 = $1950; $4900-$1950 = Savings of $2950.  now obviously there are a lot of assumptions rolled into that sales pitch but that is just one aspect of its cost improvements.