English 
Zhengfeng Road, Licheng District, Jinan City, Shandong Province,China
Author: Alex Song Publish Time: 2026-11-11 Origin: Site
Enquiries usually arrive as a number in kilos per hour. That number is useful at the end of the conversation and misleading at the start, because a formed-product line does not run at a tonnage, it runs at a piece rate. A 20 g nugget at 600 kg/h means thirty thousand pieces an hour crossing every belt, fryer and packing station. A 60 g patty at the same tonnage means ten thousand. Identical weight, completely different machine.
So the two numbers worth settling first are piece weight and the belt speed the line will run at. Everything else, from fryer length to how many people stand at the packing table, follows from those two. A supplier who quotes capacity without asking for piece weight is quoting a number that will not survive contact with the first production run.
At the small end, a compact former such as the MF200 is a single-machine proposition: one former, a short fryer, and a crew of two or three. It suits a plant testing the market with one or two products, where the risk to manage is whether the product sells rather than whether the line can keep up.
Three hundred kilos an hour, the middle of the MF400 range, is the size that fits a processor who already sells formed product but does not want to commit a full high-capacity line. It is still single-machine downstream, still one crew, but the settings start to matter: batter viscosity, crumb type and fryer setpoint have to be written down per product instead of carried in someone's head.
At 600 kg/h the constraint stops being the former. Everything downstream has to keep up for the minutes the former runs flat out, and anything sized for a smaller machine becomes the limit. The step from 300 to 600 is not twice the machine; it is a different class of line planning, because the buffer between stages has to be designed rather than assumed.
In a line that is under-specified, the bottleneck moves rather than disappears. Size the former up and the fryer becomes the limit. Size the fryer up and the freezer or the packing table becomes the limit. Each fix relocates the problem, which is why line planning is a question of where you want the slack to sit, not of eliminating it.
The practical answer is to put the slack where a stoppage is easiest to absorb: usually a short buffer before the fryer and enough cold capacity after it. Product waiting on a belt before the fryer is recoverable. Product waiting to go into a freezer that cannot take it is a quality problem.
Labour is the second constraint that is easy to overlook. Piece rate decides how many people the packing end needs, and that headcount is often what makes a large line uneconomic at low volume: the machine is capable, but staffing it across three shifts is a different proposition from running one.
Above roughly 600 kg/h, and certainly by the 1200 kg/h turnkey arrangement, buying machines separately stops being the economical route. The interfaces between stages start to outweigh the stages themselves: conveyor heights, transfer points, controls that must talk to each other, and the sequence logic that stops the line safely when one machine trips.
Ask for the interface drawings before the order rather than after. The most avoidable surprise on a project of this size is discovering that two machines bought as one line still expect different conveyor heights.
A turnkey line is not simply a longer shopping list. It is a single design where the stages are sized against each other on purpose, and where the control system knows that the fryer cannot start before the former and that the freezer must be ready before the fryer discharges.
Two recent shipments bracket the middle of this range. A 600 kg/h nuggets line went to Uzbekistan built around the top of the MF400 range, and a 300 kg/h patty and nuggets line went to Poland running both products from one former on interchangeable mould sets. The difference between them is not only tonnage: it is how much of the line had to be re-planned rather than scaled.
If you are at the point of choosing, send the product, the piece weight, the packs per shift and the voltage on site and the crew you expect to staff it with. A layout drawing helps too, and it saves a round of questions about ceiling height and door widths. The nuggets processing line page lists the configurations we build, and the answer to which capacity suits you is usually decided in that first exchange rather than after a quotation.
