Expanded Snack Manufacturing Equipment

If you are seeking expanded snack manufacturing opportunities using corn, rice and other cereal ingredients, consider the innovative equipment from Reading Bakery Systems.

Reading Bakery Systems (RBS), headquartered in Robesonia, Pennsylvania, serves customers in the global snack food industry. We offer a complete line of mixing, dough handling and forming, baking, drying, and supplemental equipment, biscuit systems, cracker systems, bread snack systems, potato snack systems, pretzel systems, and control systems.

What Are Direct Expanded Snacks?

Direct expanded products are so-named because they are formed on an extruder and expand immediately when they emerge from the die. Only drying or frying are required to reduce the moisture content and ready them for consumption.

Direct expanded snacks are puffy, crunchy snacks made primarily from cereal ingredients, such as rice, corn and potato. Wheat is less common because the gluten hinders the expansion of the product.

The ready-to-eat snacks come in a variety of simple shapes, including curls, balls, rings, animals and stars, and are often textured and coated with salt, spices, or cheese to make them tasty and fun.

RBS Expanded Snack System

The cutting-edge RBS Expanded Snack System optimizes output and efficiency to improve your products and your process, enabling you to produce corn curls and corn ball shapes, popcorn, onion rings, and more!

The High-Pressure Extruder mixes and cooks ingredients to produce expanded shapes, including curls, popcorn shapes, rings, and balls. Its flexible design provides for quick and easy changeover of the screws, barrels and product dies, allowing for a wide variety of products with interesting textures and flavors in different shapes.

The Tumble Dryer reduces the moisture of the product to the proper, finished level, typically 1.5-4%. For many applications, this dryer is capable of handling product from two extruders at once. Air circulation, speed, and temperature control are automatic, and drying time can be adjusted during operation to ensure quality control.

If you are not sure whether this equipment is right for your products, visit with our team at the Reading Bakery Systems Science & Innovation Center in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania.

The 30,000-square-foot Innovation Center is a unique, fully equipped and licensed food processing research and development facility that is used to demonstrate our equipment and by customers and industry partners to confidentially:

  • Demonstrate new processes
  • Test new machinery and processing techniques
  • Validate ingredients and test ingredient changes
  • Research innovations in mixing, forming, baking and drying to maximize profitability
  • Produce market and trade show samples for testing

Test your products and processes on our single screw extrusion system and other process equipment, such as continuous mixing, caustic cooking, and convective or radiant baking, that are designed to help you create innovative snack products and maximize profitability.

If you are interested in expanded snack manufacturing equipment, a supplier such as Reading Bakery Systems can help you customize a system that meets your unique production needs. Get in touch with us at (01) 610-693-5816, or click here to explore our equipment.