The only way a company can supply millions of high quality confectionery products to the market every day all over the world is to concentrate on a policy of continual innovation, applied to production and packaging processes as well. This is the case for Ferrero, which every year invests in applying organisational and technical innovations to its production lines. Many patents have been granted, protecting Ferrero’s creativity and imagination as applied to industrial production techniques.
The constant emphasis on quality, combined with the need to create completely unique confectionery products, has often required the development of special techniques and machinery. This is the case of Ferrero Rocher, a spherical wafer. This special feature – its unusual shape, which has since been applied to other Ferrero products – involved the study and construction of unique machinery, which until then was unknown in the market. Ferrero is also in the forefront as far as packaging is concerned, studying and developing types of packaging that can improve conservation and extend shelf-life (and therefore the “sell by” date). These are guaranteed by carefully testing the physical, chemical and microbiological conditions. Most significantly, new technical solutions are being developed to ensure that packaging can protect products against extreme temperatures in challenging climates, as well as active packaging (that can protect and preserve foods, for example, by absorbing oxygen), anti-tampering packaging (effective in protecting products from possible tampering) and high oxygen barrier packaging (made with a highly impermeable film, which is particularly impermeable to oxygen), to limit oxidation.
Even simple procedures, such as tying a ribbon or decorating a product, can be problematic if they need to be done on large numbers of finished products. In fact, it is not possible to manually oversee such a procedure without putting the quality of these products at risk. For this reason, Ferrero has had to implement a high level of automation in its production lines, so as to improve the presentation of its products with standardised decorations, while keeping the number of production steps to a minimum. Systems and machinery have been designed to work on many products simultaneously, while retaining the individual care and attention typical of a crafted product.