just ordered an 80kilo spiral mixer and will soon be able to make all our day’s dough, even on the busiest of days in 2 batches, i’m now thinking it may finally make sense to buy a divider rounder.
i went down to pizza equipment pro’s in bay area 6mo ago and tried out the friul divider/rounder with our dough and was more or less pleased with the results. it’s a very compact but capable machine. the balls weren’t as taught as a hand rolled ball, but i didn’t hold on to any when we left to see how they performed after overnight fermentation, but i think for pizza it would be just fine. at the time because we were still making 4-8 batches of dough a day in the ol’ hobart, the roi of the fruil was marginally too long. but now with the added efficiency of the spiral, it will cut considerably more time and shorten the roi from 4 years to 2 years making it a no brainer.
alternately maybe just a rounder with a built in table catcher like the AM Mfg R900T with rotating table and just continue to hand scale the balls. not sure i have the space for a full divider rounder from AM Mfg.
at pizza expo i also saw a promising prototype by Somerset and another compact unit by a Dutch company Daub
in the end the idea of the compactness and lower price of the fruil and being able to bust through a day’s dough needs in an hour instead of 4 is very appealing tho.
anyone out there with a Friul divider rounder? anyone used both Friul and AM mfg? Anyone ever used, seen or tried the Daub or Somerset?
We hand scale, use the the AM R 900T and a large spiral mixer. We mix 100 Lbs of flour at a time and do 5 or 6 batches on a Friday. Using 2 people, from the time we start to the time we’re finished cleaning the mixer and rounder is a little under 2 hours. I’ve never heard of Fruil so I can’t comment there but I feel the doughballs out of the R900 are as tight if not more so than doing it by hand.
We have 4 R-900’s and 2 of the new somersets. We purchased the first Somerset after viewing at Pizza Expo to see if it would be a good replacement for a couple older Univex DR42’s at our slower stores that needed to be replaced. The Somerset unit exceeded our expectations and we bought a second one after a month of testing (and they continue to work very well). In the future we will purchase the Somersets for new stores with projected annual volume of less than $1m and continue to buy the R-900’s for stores in excess of $1m. The R-900’s are definitely sturdier and capable of higher volume, but are a little more difficult to keep clean, take up more room and of course, cost more. No matter which brand you choose, these units easily pay for themselves in labor savings and consistently rolled dough balls.
We used an AM S300 for a long time, its a great machine but a bear to clean. We just started using a Vemag 500. it’s more versatile than the AM S300 but also more expensive and has a bigger footprint.
i went and visited our friends at woodstone and they had a somerset, so ran a batch of dough through it and was please with the tightness of the doughballs compared to the friul (which is the same machine as the univex dr42).
i think we will buy the somerset rounder and then add the divider when it comes out in the fall.
had a conversation today with somerset about their fall release of their divider. it’ sounds like it’s hitting all the right marks and will be a great match for our operation over the friul (old univex) or the AM. it uses similar piston pockets for forming the dough (similar to the AM) which is less destructive to the dough over the auger+extruder of the friul. he said cleanup is 5 min or less. its relatively compact. divider will be in the $14,000 range (end user price), so total of $20k for divider +rounder. it think it will be a winner for our size operation.
Hi Daniel…Just curious how many pizza do you sell everyday on average? we make about 150 on average, fri-sat around 250. i am trying to justify spending 20k to myself.
Thanks
we’re a touch busier, 2oo-300. furthermore we have some of the higher wages in the country, so for us its a no brainer now. when we were using the hobart and only making 45# batches, the divider rounder made less sense as it works best if you’re able to continually feed it with out significant breaks. managing the divider and making batch after batch of dough wouldn’t have been a good workflow. now that we can make 150# batches with our new spiral mixer we can be much more efficient and better utilize the divider. with the hobart it would have been a 4 year ROI at best. with the spiral mixer it probably brings it down to 2 year ROI. so i’m ordering the somerset rounder asap and the divider as soon as it’s released come fall.