It is a turnkey installation, which includes a 28-head RV series weigher, and is achieving 400 packs a minute at fruit snacks manufacturer Stream Foods’s factory at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire.
The CCW-RV-228 is working in tandem with a 16-head RV model, the 28-head machine weighing primary packs from 16 to 30g of the company’s Fruit Bowl range of fruit flakes, yogurt coated flakes and raisins and fruit shapes. The16-head counts these into groups of five, six, eight, 10, 12 and 20 multipacks.
This combination delivers 80 multipacks a minute for five packs and has reduced the demand for three existing multihead weighers. These machines have now been redeployed on more specialist products where speed and output are less critical.
As well as quadrupling the speed of the packing operation, accuracy levels have also been greatly improved. “Product giveaway is a cardinal sin and this is something we particularly wanted to address with this new installation,” says Stream Foods’s factory manager Andy Spall.
“Just half a gram overweight in a 20g pack quickly amounts to a huge amount of free product over a single production run. With the Ishida solution, we are now constantly to within a tiny fraction of the target weight.”
Currently, the multipacks are put into cases by hand, but Stream Foods is automating this operation.
Contact Ishida Europe for more information.