Equipment at the next size

The equipment decisions here are unusually consequential because two of them affect product uniformity rather than only throughput.

Buy against the constraint

Measure where a production day goes for a month. It will be filling, sealing and cleaning, with blending a small block in the middle.

A bigger blender makes a fast step faster and can make the product worse, for the reason below.

The filler, first

An auger filler with a check-weigher buys accuracy, speed and reduced dust exposure at once. Fill accuracy is a labeling matter here, not only an efficiency one, so this is the purchase that improves compliance as well as output.

Keep the hopper topped up rather than running it down, because a hopper emptying is a hopper segregating, and that is a composition drift through the run rather than only a weight drift.

Blender fill level is the trap

A tumbling or V-blender mixes properly only within a fill-level range. Over-filled it cannot fold; under-filled the material slides rather than tumbling and segregates.

So buying a much larger blender and running small batches in it produces worse uniformity than the smaller blender did. Size the blender to your normal batch, not to your largest ambition.

And re-establish blend time by sampling when the blender changes, because the time is a property of the equipment and fill level rather than of the formula.

What not to buy

Laboratory equipment, since identity and potency testing go to a contract laboratory permanently.

A stick-pack or sachet machine, which is contract work at this scale.

And anything requiring space you do not have, since sealed dry storage is usually the real constraint rather than the machine.

References