i bought the LBC KM-80p and we have been super happy too. we bought based on accounts chronicled here and the fact that LBC is only 60 miles away and our 40 year old hobart was dead and a rush fix of the hobart would have cost the same as the LBC. and LBC could get us a mixer in 24 hours due to the proximity. also weighed in their favor that if there are ever parts needed we can hopefully get same day.
it is a chinese made mixer, so there is some concern looming that “you get what you pay for” but it’s seemingly robust where it needs to be and has pretty straight forward controls with manual override. in the limited research i’ve done, there are several brands all putting their sticker on the exact same machine and LBC was considerably cheaper than the others. might we have made another decision if we had the luxury of time and more research? maybe. is there a better price to performance spiral out there? not that i know of, at least not one that is supported in the us. no regrets for our needs at the time.
if you’re always using at the low end of the capacity, you might want to consider something smaller like a univex, but for our needs, it has saved us tremendous amounts of labor because we are mostly mixing batches at 80% of capacity. we are making 2 - 150# batches in the LBC instead of 6 - 60# batches in our hobart. that gave us the efficiency to finally buy a somerset rounder and any day now we will take delivery of the new somerset divider. this whole investment will turn a 6+hour dough shift into around a 2 hour dough shift. with our rapidly increasing minimum wages here, the $30,000 for all 3 pieces of equipment will pay for itself in a little more than 1 year. a total no brainer, no matter how you look at.
