Ishida weighers improve efficiences and reduce breakages
The installation of two Ishida multihead weighers at leading Germany bakery company Pauly has improved filling speeds, halved giveaway and minimised breakages for the company’s popular saltsticks snack range.
Pauly packs an estimated 7000 kilometres of saltsticks every day into both 250g bags and dual thermoformed trays, where each section contains 125g.
The saltsticks are difficult to weigh and pack due to their fragility and 120mm length. The sticks have a tendency to form tangles due 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.
In addition, the continual rubbing together of the sticks produces quite a lot of dust, which means frequent cleaning of the packing line is needed.
More follows…
Before the installation of the two Ishida multihead weighers, the sticks were packed on linear weighers. These were slow and inaccurate, with giveaway of around 10% necessary in order to ensure that 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 specifically to fill bags, while the second was specially 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 have helped the company to improve pack presentation, reducing breakages by a massive 30%. This is due to a number of design features. For example, specially shaped feeder troughs ease the transition from horizontal to vertical as the product falls into the hoppers, while funnel inserts in the hoppers help to keep all the sticks pointing in the same direction.
More follows…
On the bags line, the filling speed is 35ppm, compared with the previous value of 17 ppm. For the trays, the rate is now 32 dual packs per minute. Yields too are improving. “The weighers are very accurate; giveaway has been reduced by half,“ comments Stefan Kruse, Technical Manager at Pauly
Cleaning of the Ishida multihead weighers is remarkably quick and easy, with all 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 to reduce dust and also saves labour, as it is no longer necessary to have one operator dedicated almost entirely to re-orienting 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 adds that he is confident that the Ishida weighers will have paid for themselves within two years.
