chewing gum line in Africa

Based in Nairobi, Kenya, Kenafric currently counts approximately 1500 employees, making it one of the main players in Africa’s confectionery industry.

Operating on the principle of always staying one step ahead, Kenafric has been a partner of Bosch Packaging Technology for years. This partnership helps the company ensure that its products are produced and packaged with the latest technologies, fostering innovation, customer satisfaction and growth. In particular, when one of Kenafric’s recently launched product brands grew increasingly popular, it sought an energy-efficient processing and packaging line that could help it meet the growing demand.

Kenafric is the largest manufacturer of confectionery in East and Central Africa, producing a large selection of candy products including hard boiled, bubble gum, lollipops and toffees. Amongst its top selling brands are its cream yoghurt ice-cream flavored lollipops and Zing, a bubble gum.

Traditionally, confectionery products in the region were simple sugary recipes that were not branded. However, consumer demands have significantly changed during the last couple of years, with increasing requests for better quality products. Future-minded producers are building a reputation for quality and developing brand loyalty. Kenafric is one of the pioneers in terms of branding in the market and devoted to fulfilling consumer demand for high quality products.

The company recently launched its premium chewing gum brand “Fresh”, a range of squared dragées, which are bite-sized, colorful gums with a hard outer shell coated with sugar. This new chewing gum line features the flavors of peppermint, spearmint, menthol and fruit flavours. The distinct packaging stands out on shelves across Africa. Although the range was only launched in 2012, it is already very popular and considered one of the favorites in the African market.

Kenafric is committed to sustainable growth and is focused on the implementation of energy-efficient measures and technologies. Due to these efforts, this is the only company in East Africa that has been awarded the Energy Management award (EMA) by the Kenya Association of Manufacturers for three consecutive years. This annual award has recognized Kenafric for achieving significant reduction of its energy consumption year on year.

In line with this strategy, one of Kenafric’s main objectives when searching for new equipment to be integrated in its production plant was to find processing and packaging machinery with very low energy consumption rates. With this challenge in mind, the company turned to its long-time partner Bosch, who delivered reliable quality equipment with the desired energy efficiency levels. “Bosch has been a reliable partner for us since the late 1990s and supported our company in realizing new ideas and launching new products,” said Kirtan Shah, managing director, Kenafric.

When planning its new line layout, Kenafric needed a new customized line that could not only meet its energy consumption requirements, but also could produce large amounts of product with low downtime rates in order to meet the increasing market demand.

Bosch’s know-how allowed the company to develop a proprietary design of the production line, including both processing and packaging equipment that enables Kenafric to reduce its energy consumption and produce high quality products. The processing line consists of a forming extruder WEF 1020, a rolling and scoring line WWK 0401, a cooling tunnel WTC 1500 and an inline breaking drum WOB 0700.  Bosch’s rolling and scoring line at Kenafric was the first of their kind in Kenya as well as in the entire East Africa in terms of low energy consumption.

During the first processing stage, the gum mass is fed into the forming extruder WEF 1020. Thanks to their dual drive technology, the integrated feeding rollers transfer the mass into the extruding screws at a speed optimized for the processed product to ensure high quality. The extruding screws transport the product to the extruder head, generating the adequate pressure required to from the gum mass into an endless rope.  At the rolling and scoring unit WWK 0401, the mass is then formed into sheets. In the cooling tunnel WTC 1500, the product sheets are cooled down to a temperature suitable for further processing in the inline breaking drum WOB 0700 where the chewing gum sheets are separated into individual pellets. The continuous production process ensures the chewing gum is produced with equally high quality.

In the last production stage, rotation of the breaking drum carefully crushes the sheets into squared dragées. After having been sugar coated, the dragées are transported to various BVK 2000 A Miniwrap flow wrapping machines that package the gums with speeds up to 2 000 pieces per minute. The primary packaged dragées are further packaged into pillow bags using the SVE 2515 AR vertical form, fill and seal machine. Thanks to the fully automated processing and packaging solution, Kenafric reduced the risk of contamination during the production process which contributes to the high quality of the product.

With Bosch’s customized line in action, Kenafric is currently able to produce over one ton of chewing gum per hour non-stop while meeting the company guidelines in terms of energy consumption. “Bosch contributed to our successful history and is part of our flourishing future. The new line is helping us to maintain our leading position in the African confectionery market,” said Shah.

Thanks to the success of the new customized line, Kenafric is planning on implementing a second line to increase the production volumes of its famous chewing gum.

The Bosch division Packaging Technology, based in Waiblingen (Germany), is one of the leading suppliers in the field of processing and packaging technology. In more than 15 countries worldwide it develops and produces complete solutions for the pharmaceutical, food and confectionery industries. The comprehensive service portfolio completes the package. The worldwide sales and service network offers local contacts.