Nut orchards that grow hazelnuts can make money by selling hazelnuts in the shell or processing them into kernels.
To sell hazelnuts in the shell, gardeners often combine to form large lots and sell the nut under contracts. Nuts in the shell can also be supplied to grocery chains or small grocery stores, and sold to processors or other processing gardens.
Processing your hazelnuts into kernels increases the garden's profit because the kernel has a much higher value. Therefore, when receiving constant harvests, gardeners begin to think about equipment for processing.
Depending on the volume of hazelnuts, different types of equipment are used.
Very small volumes can be processed with manual nutcrackers. Their advantage is that you can manually adjust the degree of compression and get the maximum number of whole kernels.
If the volumes are larger and manual processing becomes a problem, household electric nutcrackers are used. They have a rolling principle of cracking. With a calibrated nut, they also give a high yield of whole hazelnut kernels - up to 90%. After the nutcracker, the hazelnut kernel is sorted from the shell by hand or in an aspiration column.
The set of equipment - Optima 2 electric nutcracker (70 kg/h) and aspiration column (100 kg/h) is the optimal set for processing small volumes of hazelnuts. The equipment performs basic processes and eliminates manual labor by 80%.
For the processing of industrial volumes, more productive equipment is used, and separate equipment is installed for each process. Therefore, the basic set for processing hazelnuts in industrial volumes consists of a nut calibrator in the shell, an industrial nutcracker for hazelnuts, a vibrating sieve, and aspiration for sorting cracked nuts.
The linear calibrator sorts hazelnuts in the shell according to size. This allows you to adjust the nutcracker to the size of the nut and increase the output of the entire hazelnut kernel.
A drum-type nutcracker is used for processing hazelnuts in industrial volumes. It carefully cracks large volumes of hazelnuts and allows you to obtain up to 90% of the whole kernel.
After cracking, hazelnuts need to sort the kernel from the shell and sort the kernel into fractions – whole kernel and crushed separately. Sorting takes place on a vibrating screen with aspiration, which simultaneously performs these two processes.
As a result of the operation of the baseline, it is possible to process up to 200 kg of hazelnuts per hour. The line can be supplemented according to individual volumes and needs.