Weighing in with saltsticks
24 September 2008
The installation of two Ishida multihead weighers at German bakery company Pauly has improved filling speeds, halved giveaway and minimised breakages for the company’s saltsticks snack range
Pauly packs an estimated 7,000km of saltsticks every day into 250g bags and dual thermoformed trays, where each section contains 125g.
The saltsticks are difficult to weigh and pack owing to their fragility and 120mm length. The sticks have a tendency to form tangles owing to the long pieces and this is made worse by the large flakes of salt on their surfaces. These are essential to the consumer’s taste experience but provide endless opportunities for the sticks to grip each other. The continual rubbing together of the sticks, in addition, produces much dust, which means frequent cleaning of the packing line is needed.
Before the installation of the two Ishida multihead weighers, the sticks were packed on linear weighers. These were slow and inaccurate, with giveaway of about 10% necessary in order to ensure pack weights were within legal requirement. The linear weighers experienced frequent breakdowns, and spare parts were becoming difficult to source. To fill the dual packs of saltsticks, two of the linear weighers had to operate side by side.
Ishida’s solution was to replace the three linear weighers with two modern multiheads, one designed to fill bags, while the second was equipped to fill the thermoformed packs with a device for correctly orientating the saltsticks and a double filling funnel to lower them gently into the trays. The old linear weighers had a considerably larger footprint than the new Ishidas, so this two-for-three replacement has also freed up valuable floor space for Pauly.
The 16-head Ishida weighers are said to have helped the company improve pack presentation, reducing breakages by a massive 30%. This is owing to many design features. Specially shaped feeder troughs ease the transition, for example, from horizontal to vertical as the product falls into the hoppers, while funnel inserts in the hoppers help to keep the sticks pointing in the same direction.
On the bags line, the filling speed is 35ppm, compared with the previous value of 17ppm. For the trays, the rate is now 32 dual packs per minute. Yields too are improving. “The weighers are accurate; giveaway has been halved,“ says Stefan Kruse, technical manager at Pauly.
Cleaning the Ishida multihead weighers is said to be quick and easy, with contact surfaces being easily removable and replaceable by hand, even while the machines are in operation. The new distribution system for tray-filling has helped reduce dust and saves labour, as it is no longer necessary to have one operator dedicated almost entirely to reorienting sticks that have fallen across the tray.
“We are the most efficient contender in our market segment. To go on leading the way, we must use fully automatic, state-of-the-art packaging machinery,” says Michael Pauly, general manager at Pauly, who says he’s confident Ishida weighers will have paid for themselves within two years.
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