Abstract: A product feed apparatus for transferring a plurality of products such as cookies from a single holder to a corresponding plurality of transversely spaced apart conveyor lines. The apparatus includes a shuttle guide extending across the conveyor lines and including a gate opening normally covered by a gate. The product holder carries a stack of the products and terminates in a feed opening at one extremity of the gate opening. A shuttle is supported on the shuttle guide for movement past the feed opening to a discharge position. The shuttle includes a number of product openings which come into successive alignment with the feed opening on movement of the shuttle toward its discharge position so that on location of the shuttle in its discharge position the products are located in the product openings in overlying relation to the gate. The products are then transferred to the conveyor lines on opening of the gate.

Abstract: As a plurality of rows of baked cookie halves, each having a flat side and a rounded side, leave the oven-cooler on a transfer conveyor belt they are allowed to fall off the end of the belt onto a lower conveyor belt. Every other row is allowed to free-fall with the result that they flip 180.degree. in mid air while the remaining rows are guided by a slide which is moved into position so that alternate rows of cookie halves on the lower conveyor belt are disposed with the flat side up and the flat side down, respectively. A filling is automatically deposited on the cookie halves having the flat side up and a vacuum pick-up device raises each row of cookie halves having the flat side down and deposits them on the filled cookie halves as they pass underneath.

Abstract: An arrangement of sliced food stuffs of variable meltability, absorbency, or juice/seasoning producing character so that the absorbent materials will be best suited in their sequential placement to best retain the juices or melt products during the cooking which may be broiled or cooked in a pan as all the exterior edges of each component slice fall even with and in the same plane as all other slices on the skewer thus insuring even cooking and full retention of all possible cooking liquids generated from within or exteriorly applied.

Abstract: A device for the production of a food article, in which food material is extruded through a generally arcuate die opening so that a differential in the frictional forces between the center portion and the end portions of the arcuate opening causes the material to curl about an axis transverse to the die axis and thus assume the general shape of a shell. The device lends itself to the fabrication, in an automatic, consistent and simple way, of a food product of a unique structure which has a filling of meat within a covering of dough.

Abstract: A shredded food article in the form of a biscuit is produced by depositing a web of longitudinally shredded food transversely across a moving bed in a uniform overlapping zigzag configuration to produce a wider, continuous, multiple layer sheet. The sheet is first cut longitudinally and is then cut transversely to produce a plurality of files and rows of lapped shredded biscuits on the moving bed. The process may include two separate lapping operations in which a flavorful filling is deposited between laps to produce a composite biscuit having an interior filling.