Abstract: Flexible sheets of foodstuffs, such as a tortilla, are prepared for cooking by automatically wrapping each tortilla around a perforated inner cooking cylinder and telescoping an outer cooking cylinder over the so-wrapped inner cylinder. The wrapping and telescoping operations are carried out with the use of a carriage which rotates about a horizontal axis by feeding the inner cylinders to the carriage such that the cylinders are parallel to the axis of rotation and are carried in a circular path about that axis. At a feed station tortillas are fed sequentially in a generally radial direction into the path of the inner cylinders so that the outside of each cylinder contacts a surface of a tortilla. Vacuum is applied to the inside of each cylinder to hold the tortilla in place, and as the cylinder continues to move along its circular path it moves past a flexible guide arrangement which contacts the opposite surface of the tortilla and wraps it around the cylinder.

Abstract: Flexible sheets of foodstuffs, such as a tortilla, are prepared for cooking by automatically wrapping each tortilla around a perforated inner cooking cylinder and telescoping an outer cooking cylinder over the so-wrapped inner cylinder. Vacuum is applied to the inside of each cylinder to hold the tortilla in place, and as the cylinder continues to move along its circular path it moves past a flexible guide arrangement which contacts the opposite surface of the tortilla and wraps it around the cylinder.

Abstract: An apparatus for stacking food chips in a cylindrical container. Random chips are oriented into tandem alignment on an inclined conveyor traveling in an upward direction and are deposited into an upright cylindrical stacking tube above a station for the empty cylindrical containers. A valve comprising operatively associated upper and lower blades in the stacking tube load vertical stacks of chips into the cylindrical containers.