Getting a handle on materials handling in sports nutrition

When you started out making protein bars or powders in your garage, you probably didn’t think too much about bulk materials handling processes. You opened the bags or boxes of ingredients, mixed them together and packaged them to order without really considering the bigger picture. While this is fine at small scales, you’ll need to take a different approach if you want your sports nutrition product business to grow. Read on to find out more… Materials handing matters In the small-scale production of sports nutrition products, there is often little thought given to the design of the production facility when getting started in sports nutrition manufacturing. It’s usually a case of buying the equipment you need and was cheap, then fitting it all into the only space you have available! In terms of your ‘production line’, this might simply involve opening bags and boxes of ingredients by hand, tipping them into a mixer, then hand-filling the finished product into packets or bottles at the end. However, if you want to scale up your operation by manufacturing larger batches, and/or producing a wider range of products to appeal to different consumers, you’ll soon find that this ‘needs-must’ approach to manual handling is inefficient and wasteful – and anything that creates waste is bad for business and profitability. Continuous vs. manual processing If your overall target is to scale up to produce large volumes of sports nutrition products, then a continuous and largely automated production line set-up may be suitable. Unlike a manual process, in continuous processing, the equipment used for one step of a production line is directly coupled to the next. Say you were making a protein shake blend, for example – rather than tipping, blending and packaging the recipe in separate steps by hand, this is done in an automated fashion, with blended ingredients being dispensed directly into and from the mixer, and onwards into the packaging line via augers and conveyor belts. This approach virtually eliminates the need for materials handling at all and is ideal for facilities that handle large volumes of a few varieties of product.

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