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Late August and early September were very busy months for us and we made lots of progress. First piece of equipment to arrive was the Ilapak Carrera 500 wrapping line. Very exciting to see it coming to its new home and being off loaded by Atlantic Millwrights.
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| 2,000 pounds of equipment |
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| Reaching its place in our facility |
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| In our eagerness to get the Egan Molding Line from Grand Rapids, we may have overshot on the truck we sent. What do you think? But Saxon Transportation came through and expedited delivery and that is what matters. |
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| 3,000 pounds. Can you see "Sky Bar" etched on the side? Nice touch, Egan, we love it! |
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| Welcome home, new team member. |
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| Savage Bros. tempering machine and center storage units followed close behind and we all cheered the fact that now we had all the big equipment. |
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| Our first batch of caramel in the cooker. |
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| Zachary from Ilapak and Ben from Egan having lunch at Franco's during a busy installation week. |
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| 24 bar box is here, nothing in it yet of course! |
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| We switched on the Egan molding line. What a beautiful sight! Only the caramel center made at this point though. |
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| Problems! We manually filled the hoppers and the ratios were not right. Not Egan's fault. |
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This was taken as a photo of the first chocolate on the floor, but it is now also remarkable because that hose caused most of the grief during the installation week. The Savage chocolate tempering machine kept tripping out and we could not figure out why. We drained the hose and blew it out, we swapped the pump for one of the center storage units, we did a whole bunch of things that consumed so much valuable time. In the end it turned out that our pumping speed was the problem. We slowed it down and boom! problem solved. |
We are now in the process of making and testing the other centers, along with the other center storage units from Savage (which we did not get to after the chocolate tempering machine consumed so much time and effort.) The goal is still to have Sky Bars in your hands by the end of the year. Fingers crossed!
And mark your calendars: we plan to host an opening party on December 7th so hold the date as you are all invited. More information coming soon.
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Until next time, stay well and stay tuned!
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