Bean Cutters, Swan Song!

"So, let's get real, Tim!", you might say.

"No one in their right mind applies bean cutters to 15 ton/hour finished lines, only smaller ones." So, let's take a look at smaller lines. Let's also look at those that produce 10mm cuts as a primary product, rather than shoestring.

One aspect of comparison is that ADR capacity is granular: It can handle about 12 tons/hour of product (10mm cut), wet basis at the ADR. So if your line is 6 tons/hour finished or less (finished capacity is roughly half of wet cut capacity), one ADR will handle your defect control needs. Put a sorter downstream of the ADR for the full ADR-First (tm) effect, but that is optional. The issue is: If you run lower finished capacity, the capital expense of ADR is the same as for the larger line. Eventually, you can get low enough capacity so that the bean cutter approach looks attractive. Let's see how low we need to go before bean cutters make sense economically:

The rough numbers (see my Feb. 7 posting below) is that ADR saves €33.833 per finished ton per hour per year in product loss, ignoring the value loss of shortened product from the bean cutter, based on all our previous assumptions. Let's assume a 3-year payback is attractive for most processors. Let's assume a bean cutter line segment (with sorter) costs €350.000 and an ADR-only segment costs €500.000.

Under those assumptions, you would need a finished capacity of less than 1.5 tons per hour for bean cutters to make sense. These days, I don't hear of anyone designing so small a line.

Also, then, it takes only 3 tons per hour of finished capacity to make two ADRs pay back. But you won't need them unless finished capacity is over 6 tons per hour. In the end, all this means is that if your line produces more than 1.5 tons per hour finished, and your economics align with our assumptions of the last posting, ADR is the right choice for defect control, rather than bean cutters.

To top it off, the ADR-only line can remove 23% more defects than the bean cutter line. So if your raw quality is marginal, ADR will keep you in grade when the bean cutter will not. That is not figured into the equation..... yet!

It seems that, in the end, bean cutters are best applied to... beans!

Tim

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