An international confectionery company was building its first North Carolina manufacturing facility and needed a better sugar handling solution for its existing process: a pressure conveying system was blowing sugar everywhere, blowing out rupture panels on silos, and sending maintenance staff on repeated manual repair calls.
This new facility was the opportunity to fix it. The company's engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) partner brought in AZO to evaluate the handling system. We engineered a system that occupied a smaller footprint with fewer components, and a first-time switch to vacuum pneumatic conveying.
The existing operation ran a pressure conveying system for bulk sugar. It worked, technically. But it also blew sugar out regularly, generated significant housekeeping costs, and lacked the dosing accuracy the company needed.
The most concrete failure point: the pressure system was blowing out rupture panels on the silos. Every time it happened, someone had to go replace them manually. That's a maintenance and labor cost that compounds over time, and a signal that the system was overworked relative to what it needed to do.
When the EPC scoped the greenfield facility, the initial plan was large. Silos were elevated on support structures with multiple dosing screws and receivers beneath. A tall building had to accommodate this vertical footprint. The system also included five filter receivers, each with a slide gate valve at the inlet. Four separate conveying lines ran from the silos, with outdoor cabinets to house all the piping connections. That's a lot of components with the potential for something to go wrong.
AZO brought two things to the project: extensive knowledge of how sugar behaves in conveying systems and a willingness to challenge assumptions in the original scope.
The first change was moving the silos closer to the ground. The original design had them elevated on support structures to accommodate the process flow. AZO's engineering review showed that wasn't necessary. Bringing the silos down reduced building height without affecting throughput, which meant less steel, simpler structural engineering, and lower construction costs.
From there, AZO cut the component count significantly. Four dosing screws and two receivers were removed from the silo area entirely. The original four-line conveying configuration was replaced with a single line and diverter valves, eliminating the need for multiple outdoor piping cabinets.
The Dust Hazard Analysis (DHA) that the customer performed for the project created another opportunity. AZO proposed vacuum conveying as the alternative to the pressure system to reduce the risk of sugar dust propagation. With vacuum, any fugitive dust is drawn back into the system rather than expelled.
The DHA results also made clear that the five slide gate valves originally scoped at the inlet of each filter receiver weren't needed. AZO removed all five. At roughly $20,000 each, that's a $100,000 reduction in equipment cost from a single engineering decision.
The last piece was dosing accuracy. The new design positioned a scale closer to the point where sugar enters the process, rather than upstream at the silo. Weighing closer to the use point gives a more accurate read of what's actually going into production run after run.
Engineering began in August 2024 and equipment started arriving in July 2025, with installation running through approximately April 2026, marking a nine-month installation window for a system of this complexity.
AZO field service technicians were on-site multiple times throughout the process. They helped the customer's team work through installation questions, resolve issues as they surfaced, and validate that the system was meeting AZO standards before startup.
Maintenance training was part of the handoff. The customer's maintenance managers attended an AZO training session on the system and came away with a clear picture of how it operates day-to-day. The feedback was that the system was simple and straightforward to maintain.
The system is currently in testing and commissioning. Testing confirmed the system hits its transfer rate targets. The vacuum conveying system moves 3,500 lbs of sugar per hour and can unload a full tanker truck into the silo in under two hours. Production is expected in Q4 2026 or Q1 2027.
The facility is also much cleaner. Vacuum conveying contains sugar dust rather than dispersing it, which means lower housekeeping costs and safer working conditions.
Overall, the building is shorter, the component count is lower, and the system is simpler to maintain.
Confectionery manufacturers handle sugar in enormous volumes, but handling it well requires more than just moving it from point A to point B. Dust control, dosing accuracy, and maintenance burden are all downstream consequences of how a conveying system is designed.
This project succeeded because AZO came in with an engineering perspective on the scope, not just a quote for the system as specified. The result is a greenfield facility built around what the process actually needs, without the overengineering that would have followed the customer into the next decade.
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