"All you need is love and a good coffee" is one of the claims of Caffè Chicco d’Oro (www.chiccodoro.com), the roasting company based in Balerna, Switzerland, since 1949 and known for its traditional golden packaging.
Caffè Chicco d'Oro owes its fortune to a dedicate attention to the production process, and especially to the slow roasting, which follows a punctual recipe respecting the aroma since generations, and to an entrepreneurial vision where quality comes first.
The Caffè Chicco d ’Oro’s quality begins with the selection of green beans and goes through all stages of production up to the delivery, where quality is submitted to the judgment of the most demanding baristas in Switzerland, northern Italy and the rest of Europe, having remained loyal to the brand for many years.
While searching for an increase of the production volume, especially in the sorting phase of the roasted product, the company turned to Cimbria for the supply of an optical sorter dedicated to roasted beans allowing to triple the daily production. An ambitious result considering the lower weight of roasted beans compared to green beans.
The proposed solution, the 5-chutes SEA.CX, has been equipped with top technology, meaning 4 cameras per channel, with 2 RGB Full-Color cameras, combined with Infrared and InGaAs technologies, to ensure the best sorting of visible shapes and colors, and also the detection of foreign bodies with similar colors to roasted coffee, invisible to naked eyes but visible at infrared frequencies. In fact, although only the good green beans passed by the first sorting process are brought to cooking, roasting changes their internal structure and creates the conditions for a second sorting. SEA.CX is therefore programmed, based on the Caffè Chicco d’Oro recipe, to retain only the beans with perfect roasting. In addition, only a small part of over roasted beans passes the selection, as the traditional recipe requires it to respecting the historic aroma. Moreover, SEA.CX eliminates foreign bodies such as small pieces of wood, glass and stones, which can damage the machines in the milling process.
To test our product, a series of lab trials were carried out in Imola, adding to standard roasted coffee 100 contaminants of different nature, in order to test the machines under maximum stress and verify the results. The request, once trials succeeded, was the introduction of SEA.CX in the Caffè Chicco d ‘Oro’s production process in turnkey mode: since our machine was significantly more voluminous than the previous one replaced, we had to design and build a new platform, relocating the elevators and moving the existing silos. The layout of the plant and the management of the product flow were so completely rebuilt, thanks to the support of our Italian Cimbria Heid team.
The technical edge of SEA.CX, the flexibility shown by custom interventions and the reliability of a 75 years old company, made this project possible. Caffè Chicco d’Oro and Cimbria, sharing the passion for quality and the coffee, invest on the pleasure of coffee lovers across Europe and that of baristas in search of the perfect cup.
