With food service sales growing at a steady clip, a North West US Coffee Co. builds an integrated filling/bagging line, which includes a checkweighing system, robotic pick-and-place packer, and a thermal transfer printer to print directly onto their packages.

With the explosive growth of restaurant and institutional foodservice meals, a North West USA Company, found increased demand for its various sizes of packaged dry mixes for gourmet soups and bases, gravies and sauces, hot and cold beverages and desserts. A direct outgrowth of the company's coffee product lines, the foodservice lines required technology that maintains company goals of providing employees with more efficient and ergonomic working conditions.

To address their goals, the company recently installed a several pieces of new equipment on one of its important form/fill/seal lines.

The company manually case-packaged product and the operators would have to pull packages off the line and hand weigh them, according to the food packaging and quality manager. "The operator would have to dedicate most of his or her time to the case packing part of the operation, which was very time consuming and inefficient, and also wasn't ergonomic."

The company addressed the situation by adding a Cornerstone checkweigher from Hi-Speed Checkweigher Systems, which forms the core of the new system that allows the line operator to truly operate the entire line.

(EasyPrint shown printing Coffee bags in-line directly to packaging material)

Part of a line that includes a new robotic pick-and-place packer and other new handling and labeling equipment, the checkweigher replaces the hand packing operation and the random manual checkweighing of packages. The system has been key to improving performances of the packaging line and freeing employees up to operate the line more efficiently.

Already familiar with Hi-Speed products, attention was caught by the modular and custom-configured design, which allowed it to be integrated effortlessly into the company's dry mix line. "Space is always an issue, the Cornerstone is a compact unit with a low profile that fit easily into the space we had."

Changeover flexibility

The company's North West facility includes four lines packaging a range of gourmet foodservice blends and mixes. The redesigned line produces between 30-40% of the packaged production volume. Operating five days a week, the plant runs two production shifts with a third daily shift largely for sanitation and maintenance.

The foodservice brand is distributed throughout the United States, Canada and the Pacific Rim. "We are customer driven, and we try to keep inventory low and respond quickly to customer needs," says a company spokesperson. "We often have two, and sometimes three changeovers per day."

The custom gourmet blends are mized in the formulating area, and the finished product is transferred to a hopper on the mezzanine above the production line, where it is fed to a Hayssen v/f/f/s machine. Although some beverage mixes are packaged in small individual serving pouches, the bulk of product is packaged primarily in polyester foil laminate film in sizes ranging from 2 to 4 1/4 pounds.

Keeping Costs Low

In order to keep inventory costs low, the company added a Bell-Mark programmable thermal printer to the v/f/f/s machine. This imprints product information directly on the film during packaging, allowing for the use of plain film instead of preprinted film.

Once formed, filled, and printed, the package drops onto an incline conveyor with a bag conditioner and is transferred to the checkweigher. Hi-Speed custom-configures each Cornerstone for a processor's needs. Hi-Speed representatives, Prototype Equipment and the company's personnel worked together to select product-appropriate modules, which Hi-Speed then integrated into the Cornerstone's frame. To achieve optimal product handling.

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