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A combined inspection and weighing solution

05 April 2024

A cheesemaker and dairy company is benefitting from a compact food safety inspection solution combined with a checkweigher.

A cheesemaker that processes approximately 11-billion litres of dairy liquids annually and supplies fresh products to over 60 countries, is deploying inspection and checkweighing technology from Fortress to help ensure products are free of contaminants, as well as ensuring it adheres to the latest international Weights and Measures regulations. 

Being premium products, the ability to isolate each contamination event and reduce good product wastage was an attractive feature. Currently, five customised twin-lane Raptor Combination systems are located between the upstream packaging area and the secondary case loading section in two of the company’s cheese processing plants. The design of the Raptor has solved the immediate challenge of inspecting cheese products that are tightly spaced together. 

Receiving sliced, blocked, shredded and soft cheeses directly from the upstream dual-head bagger and flow wrapping packaging machines, the integrated system starts with a compact curving conveyor. Designed to ensure optimal spacing between lanes, the conveyor also helps avoid congestion by spacing product lanes out evenly as they are fed into the individual, lane-specific metal detector aperture and checkweighing belt. 

Checkweighing challenge
One of the greatest challenges when checkweighing in fast-paced packing lines is making sure there is sufficient pitch from one pack to the next so that only one pack is present on the weigh conveyor at a time to ensure packages are not rejected as unstable weight readings.

The metal detector and checkweigher conveyor decks and belts are all designed to be easily removed from the machine for rapid deep cleans and maintenance. Operators can unclip and disconnect the conveyor motor, sanitise it, and quickly restore tracking once the conveyor is clipped back into place. 

The inspection machine consolidates a single metal detector divided into two compact apertures, plus two independent weight verification checkweighers. Each technology and lane have individual air blast reject mechanisms to isolate metal contaminants and weight rejects. This helps to reduce and minimise quality cheese products being wasted by over 50%.  

As each lane, metal detector aperture, checkweigher and reject is programmed to run independently, interruptions are minimised during product switchovers or maintenance. Additionally, it is possible to run two different product lines, pack sizes or SKUs simultaneously on the adjacent conveyors. 

After inspecting the cheese packs for metal contaminants, good cheese packs – at 140 ppm per line – are fed into the digital checkweighing system. To comply with global Weights and Measures Regulations, in just milliseconds the in-motion, three-belt checkweigher weighs, analyses, captures and reports data simultaneously. 

Products that pass both inspection tests then move onto a merging conveyor, aligning and presenting the packs to an automated downstream case packing system. 
 
For a GFSI-certified business with a continuous-improvement mindset, best practice robustness is of utmost importance. The processing plant is equally dependent on automated and intelligent machinery to extract data for traceability and to support immediate quality control decision-making and production improvements. 

Both the metal detector and checkweigher assist on all levels by capturing easy-to-read live OEE data. By gathering live production information from each lane independently, a fast-paced food facility can establish the operational parameters and extract statistics that are most valuable to them. Analysed data can include volume, weight, inspection rates, rejects and downtime.


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