New Tech Saves a Beloved Candy Bar
This week on Tech Byte, I’m excited to talk with you and some guests about 3D printing. 3D printing is one of the latest phenomena. You can use it for cosplay props, I’ve seen people use it to make shelves and organizers for the coffer makers. They actually use it to aid in prototyping for manufacturing AND they saved one of America’s favorite Candy Bars.
According to Chantz Yanagida of Stract Corporation, two different engineering firms were given the opportunity to make a specific piece of tooling for M&M Mars. Ultimately, they were able to reverse engineer a very important piece of the process – the one that puts the caramel directly on the cookie – and they made some test runs with the 3D Printed parts before using their design to remanufacture the part and save the Twix bar. This is important because it’s bringing prototyping and manufacturing back to America. Otherwise, these jobs get sent to China and takes six months to complete. Using 3D printing we can prototype here in the US in less than a third of the usual time.
The company wasn’t started to save candy bars, Marsha Roberts, one of the founders and owners had a different vision in mind.
“We’ve been working on developing the doll for all, which is a doll that can be altered for whatever disability a child has. And we were determined to have this doll made in the USA, and there are no vinyl dolls made here. It was all shipped to China and elsewhere in the nineties. So we spent two and a half years trying to figure this out. Very stubborn. And in the meantime, this was me and my business partner, Rick Harrison, who was the inventor of the doll,” says Marsha. “In the meantime, Chantz got interested in the project and Nick Desmond, who is a former Disney engineer, got interested and in the process we realized that in trying to figure out the doll that we had actually invented processes that other entrepreneurs could use to prototype and get their products to market. Because right now prototyping is ridiculously expensive. But we figured out a way that it’s affordable.”
Now they can 3D print and cast some of the simplest things like castings for cabinet pulls, all the way up to complex machine work. You can find them on their website if you have a project that needs prototyping, or if you want to follow the story of the Doll for All that will hopefully be coming to market soon.
