Getting up to speed
A major challenge involves aligning packaging rates with the speeds of single-serve items coming out of the oven. Bill Kehrli, vice-president, sales and marketing, Cavanna Packaging, said the front end of processing needs to pay more attention to how the baked goods are manufactured for single-serve sizes.
“It gets more difficult because you have to have better control over your consistency of food,” Mr. Kehrli said. “The accuracy and consistency of a larger product at a lower speed is not as critical as a smaller piece running at significantly higher speed.”
The engineering challenges are wide-ranging when retrofitting a line that used to make large rectangular pieces, Mr. Kehlri said. For example, single-serve packs require modified transfer points between conveyors and adjustments to the infeed system for flowwrapping. There are also limitations as to how many pieces can be fed into a flowwrapper. Cavanna narrowed the design of its Slim line so two flowwrappers can fit into the same footprint.
“It allows our customers to double their productivity even though they have smaller pieces,” he said. “The pounds per hour are the same, but the packaging configuration changes so the piece count goes up.”
As the smaller products move toward the wrapper, they can be more susceptible to damage than slower larger products.
“Speed must be managed, whether you’re driving a car or packaging a cracker,” Mr. Meer said. “You need to focus on reducing impacts and gentle handling.”
For example, during the product extraction from the magazine feeder to the wrapper, cookies are extracted at great speeds and the delicate surfaces often are damaged, affecting the end quality. Bosch’s new Smart Pile Loader (SPL) reduces impact on the product edge during extraction with a pusher that slows down before touching the product. This “controlled extraction” ensures gentle handling while maximizing the product protection and speed of the extraction.
At Pack Expo 2017 in Las Vegas, Bosch is launching its flexible Biscuit on Pile packaging system for plain sweet and savory biscuits for North America. The system includes a vibratory infeed system, a new gentle magazine feeder, a new horizontal flowwrapper and an integrated top-load cartoner. Its SPL was developed for gentle product handling and continuous product flow and enables cookie and cracker producers to change the size, shape or number of biscuits in a pack. The SPL can create piles of one to seven pieces with four lanes coming into the machine.
Smaller products traveling at faster speeds need tighter tolerances, Mr. Meer added. If a product’s width or height varies by even 0.05 inch, it can cause problems. When stacking a pack of six that might be running 0.05 inch thicker than normal, that adds up to a 0.3 inch variance — a big difference in the flowwrapper.
“On our new SPL magazine feeder, we made the thickness adjustment non-mechanical,” Mr. Meer said. “It is purely down to electronics and motors so the operator can let the HMI know the product is running thicker.”
A small size difference in thickness could result in the pusher scraping along the bottom edge of the product.
“If you’re not scraping, you’re making less crumbs, which means you don’t have to clean as often,” Mr. Meer said. “It’s a snowball effect.”
Jerry Buckley, regional sales manager, BluePrint Automation (BPA), said it is important for packaging equipment suppliers to work with food manufacturers early in the process to help find solutions.
BPA makes vision-guided robotic carton and case loaders that handle two cartons or cases at a time. Each can have different product counts, adding to the machine’s flexibility. For example, a food producer could create 9- or 12-count cartons on the same line. If an order needs to be completed quickly, the operator can adjust the touch-screen HMI to load a higher percentage, up to 100%, of arriving product.
Vision systems also allow bakers and snack makers to monitor their product quality as it enters and exits a flowwrapper. BPA’s 3-D vision technology can identify varieties and product variances automatically where most variety packing was previously done manually.
“Although we do often handle wrapped bars and wrapped sandwich crackers, we believe we can handle most flow-wraps without any restriction on what is inside the wrapper,” Mr. Buckley said.
No matter how small a product gets, the highest priority is providing a quality end product. As bakers work with packaging suppliers, that means finding the right combination of seal integrity and film quality.
Bosch’s Pack 403 high-speed flowwrapper comes with a feature to precisely measure and control film tension resulting in fewer wrinkles and better seals during production speed changes and during machine starts and stops.
The film barrier is more critical now than ever, Mr. Gunnell said, thanks to fewer preservatives, which often means limited shelf life. Often materials are specified and purchased without properly reviewing the requirements with all parties involved. Price is important, but barrier properties, speeds needed and seal strength are usually as important or more.
“You need to get everyone together as early as possible to make sure that we are on the same page as to what can and can’t be done,” he said.
Through all the changes, the result looks familiar to consumers. They can still pick up their favorite indulgence or BFY food in a recognizable flowwrapped package, but the process to get those foods into the package and safely wrapped has changed considerably.
