Quality of Gami equipment
Hi all, I am looking at purchasing a tempering machine and have looked at FBM, Savage, Selmi, and Gami. As of now the Gami Diva 12 seems to be the cheapest of the bunch by a significant margin. Can anyone speak to the quality of their machines and experience if you have purchased one?
I would like a machine that auto tempers, has a dosing plate, and can expand with an enrobing belt in time. From what I can see the Gami is the most cost effective upfront. I am open to other suggestions and hearing what people’s thoughts are?
Thanks!
Thanks for the info here. 6x50gr is 300gr/mold. Realistically, if you’re dosing manually (no mold loader), then you’re at maybe 2 molds/minute. That’s at most 600gr/minute which is 36kg/hr! It all adds up pretty quickly.
If you do this over the course of a day a continuous tempering machine is not a bad option. The need is to purchase for peak throughput and grow into it, not underbuy now and not be able to meet peak demand when you need to.
My next questions: what is your idea budget? Are you eligible for lease financing?
Thanks for the reply. Generally speaking we are running about 5kg /hr with a theoretical max of 15kg /hr based on the quantity of molds we have in house. A Selmi with a large capacity sounds nice, but it is overkill for us at this time and probably not worth it as you alluded to. I would say a 10kg /hr capacity would do just fine for us and something between 15-20 would be nice to grow into but not necessary for now.
We generally run milk chocolate and occasionally dark so I don’t see us changing over too often but it would be a bonus to have a quick changeover. I have found that every company I speak with talks about how easy it is to change over their machine so I don’t really have a comparable between them as to what is quickest…. Maybe it’s just me but I feel like I have heard “we have the quickest changeover” multiple times over.
You are right however, cost is a big factor for us. It is also important that we can attach a depositor for a 50g bar, 6 cavities per mold.
Any further advice you have would be appreciated.
What other qualities are you looking for? At the moment it seems price is the most important factor in your decision.
One thing to consider is that I do not think it’s possible to put an enrobing belt on a Selmi machine smaller than one with a 25kg working bowl. Which is ridiculous in a way because with enrobing you only need a few kilos of chocolate per hour so the capacity of the working bowl and tempering throughput are wasted on a 25kg bowl. I think I know why Selmi does this, but it’s a bad trade-off if you’re also not able to use the capacity of the machine fully in dosing.
As someone who’s been selling machines (mostly FBM but I have sold and researched many others), I can tell you that every machine has its plusses and minuses – no machine is perfect. There are things you are going to love about your machine and things you are going to hate, no matter whose machine you buy.
One place I recommend you focus is on how much chocolate you need per hour and per day for your depositing requirements. Related to this is how many different types/recipes of chocolates you’ll be running through the machine. You do not want to be cleaning your machine on a daily basis – no matter how easy the manufacturer will tell you it is. Removing the auger is only one very small part of the cleaning process so focusing on that metric can be really deceiving. The inner workings of the machine have to be completely dry before it can be put back together, so it’s more important to know exactly what it takes to actually clean the machine, dry it, and put it back together than it does to focus on how much time it doesn’t take to remove the auger.