Poland’s Good Food Products delivers latest snack line with key Ishida installation
pic: Ishida
Polish snacks manufacturer Good Food Products has reported success with an Ishida packing line including a multihead weigher, bagmaker and checkweigher, used to deliver a key new product line, writes Neill Barston.
The business, which is based at Tarnowo Podgórne, near Poznan, is considered to be among the country’s largest companies dedicated to producing rice and corn wafers, in addition to cracker and popcorn lines.
Its latest series, Corn A’petit waffle snacks, are produced from corn kernels and are baked with no added fat, preservatives or gluten and with reduced salt, making them a healthy alternative for snack fans. Because the snacks are 45mm in diameter, compared to traditional wafers which are 90mm, Good Food Products was seeking a completely new production line that was able to cope with this specification.
Overall, Ishida noted that its latest installation in Poland had been forged to assist Good Food operators to better control the weighing and packing process, helping to maintain throughput and high efficiency during production.
“When we were choosing our line supplier, we did a thorough market research and Ishida turned out to be the optimal choice,” said Łukasz Wawrzyniak, Engineering Department Manager at Good Food. “The quality of the company’s machines speaks for itself. We wanted to have the best solution for our new product, which we consider as a breakthrough on the snack market.”
The integrated Ishida solution features the company’s 14 head CCW-RVE multihead weigher combined with its Inspira bagmaker. The bagged snacks then have a final weight check on Ishida’s DACS-G checkweigher.
The CCW-RVE is reportedly well suited for lightweight products such as snacks. Ishida’s patented Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) technology provides greater control of the infeed of the product at the top of the weigher and to the weigh hoppers. Being able to automatically vary both the amplitude, time and frequency of the vibration ensures a steady and consistent flow of product, maintaining speed and efficiency, reducing the danger of overfill in the hoppers.
The weigher delivers excellent weighing accuracy, thanks to its advanced combination calculation software. After the best combination has been calculated, it is double checked to ensure the discharge is as accurate as possible before the portion is released to the bagmaker.
The Ishida Inspira bagmaker features intermittent jaw motion technology for high-performance forming and sealing. Features such as automated film centring, auto-splice film management, automated air-fill technology and other automatic adjustments, help to ensure consistency in production and minimise human error. Dedicated software- and servo-controlled sealing operation, with accurate jaw temperature and jaw pressure, deliver consistent pack quality and significantly reduce downtime.
The DACS-G checkweigher incorporates Ishida’s Anti-Floor Vibration (AFV) technology to maximise weighing accuracy in environments susceptible to floor vibration. Special features include Ishida’s Retail Reject Confirmation (RRC) software that checks and confirms that any out-of-spec product or pack has been successfully removed from the line.
The Ishida installation is operating 24 hours a day, five days a week. Currently, it is handling 60g packs of Corn A’petit at 40 bags per minute, well within its overall top speed of 90 bags per minute for this application and giving Good Food Products the ability to readily implement future capacity increases.
Key to the success of the project was to ensure the complete integration of the packing operation with the earlier baking and flavouring stages of production.
“The installation went flawlessly and during testing everything was working smoothly” said Wawrzyniak.
Corn A’petit is currently available in several different varieties with new flavours continually under development. This means that the Ishida weigher and bagmaker have to be able to deal effectively with changeovers. All contact parts in the CCW-RVE are easily removable without tools for cleaning, while the intuitive 380mm colour touch screen HMI on the Inspira supports rapid film and format changeovers.
“The weekly number of changeovers depends on how many bags of a particular flavour are planned to be produced, with cleaning being carried out after each changeover,” explained Wawrzyniak. “Cleaning and re-assembly takes around 30 minutes.”
