If you run a restaurant, chances are that you are looking for a suitable conveyor oven. It is ideal for speed and efficiency in baked dishes. Any recipe that can be baked quickly, works excellently in a conveyor oven. Prime examples are pizzas, sandwiches and small pies or cakes that take 20 minutes or less to be baked. Conveyor oven exporters usually supply to fast food chains, restaurants and cafes. Before you buy an oven for yourself, it is important that you understand how it functions, its benefits and how to pick the right one for your concern.
Other applications of conveyor ovens lie in the industrial sector where it is used for curing, bonding, annealing, tempering and ageing.
What is a conveyor oven?
A conveyor oven uses a continuous motion to move the food inside an oven, while ensuring that food receives uniform heat. The motion can be vertical, inclined, horizontal, or spiral. Unlike a standard oven, the conveyor oven keeps moving the food on an automate conveyor belt. This makes it ideal for high volume processing. There are many ways of powering the motion in a conveyor oven, such as rollers, belts, and chain-on-edge.
The product placement in the oven can be as per the usage. The conveyor belt speed and the temperature in the oven can be adjusted as per the number of dishes in the oven to ensure consistent heating. There are mainly three types of conveyor ovens supplied by conveyor oven exporters:
Impinger oven:
It uses forced air impingement technology for even baking, speedy heat transfer and superior texture. The oven has an electric or gas burner at the back of the oven. The heating element provides the heat, while a fan blows the hot air in all directions, ensuring that it is distributed uniformly. It also ensures that the hot air hitting the food product has a high velocity. The result is speedy baking — reducing the bake times by 20% to 25%!
Radiant ovens:
The heating elements here are located both above and below the conveyor belts. The result is that the interior walls heat up along with the air inside. This creates radiant heat that works much like a conventional oven.
Infrared Ovens
These ovens also have heating elements above and below the conveyor belts. Typically, the heating elements in an infrared oven are ceramic which can penetrate an organic material. It ensures that the food is cooked from the inside as well as outside.
Benefits of conveyor ovens
High production volume: In a conventional oven, we have to wait for the oven to heat up and then put in the load to heat up. Once baked, we have to wait for it to cool down and then load the next batch. The problem occurs when we are dealing with high production values where this process creates unnecessary delays. A conveyor oven where the same batch moves on a conveyor belt does the work faster and continuously.
Automation
A conveyor oven with its conveyor belt movement can easily be adapted to to automation. A number of chain stores use the oven to ensure that the food keeps moving on a belt automatically with very little human intervention. This has obvious advantages, such as less chances of human error, saving on labor costs, quick production, massive reduction in time and effort.
Flexibility:
Most conveyor oven exporters today offer very flexible ovens that can be adapted easily to your specific requirements. Apart from the standard temperature option, you can also change the speed of the conveyor belt and the fan speed. You can choose the volume as per your requirements. Good manufacturer can make customised products as per the client’s requirement. A simple change in speed helps us to change the heating time and gives us flexibility in how we use the oven.
You can also ask for a cooling zone. This is where the food moves once it has been cooked so as to cool down. Unlike a conventional oven, we can complete the entire cooking process within the oven chamber.
Different constructions:
Flexibility of the conveyor oven is not just restricted to its functionality. We can also have different structures to accommodate for varied conveyor belt movement and attachment. It can be vertical, spiral, and horizontal. The belt width can differ along with the oven opening. If you are looking for something that is non-standard, be sure that your conveyor oven exporter can supply customised ovens.
