Confectionery machine roll-out boasts 400 products per minute

Tag : Pillow Products
Offering a machine suitable for packaging products in trays, thetwo companies, Tevopharm and Doboy, claim their new Pack-401 issuitable for three-shift operations.

The horizontal pillow-pack machine achieves "medium to high operating speeds for output levels of 20 to 400products per minute or a film speed of up to 80 meters perminute," they assert in a recent statement.

Tighter margins are driving increased efficiencies for businessesacross the food sector. For confectioners, a lift in flexibilitychangeover rate and more competitive product life cycles couldraise efficiencies at the packaging level.

"Its design allows for flexible changeover to various packagingformats for product widths up to 450 millimeters or film widths upto 650 millimetres," add Tevopharm and Doboy, part of the €46bn german Boschgroup.

In addition, the design of the Pack-401 enables it to "operate as a standalone machine or to be integrated with otherpackaging systems such as Delta Robots, secondary packagingmachines, product handling, and various infeed modules," add the firms.

The "cantilever design of feeder, longitudinal and transverse sealing" also enables operators to have an " excellent overview during operation and facilitates access forcleaning ," they continue.

In today's competitive food sector, companies are, arguably,starting to recognise that brands are among their most valuableassets. Brands account for about one-third of the value of Fortune500 companies, and a recent report from Milward Brown Optimor foundthat the combined value of its Top 100 Brandz, across allindustries, topped €1.2 trillion in 2008, a 21 per cent risefrom about €1 trillion in 2007.

Harnassing this state-of-play, Bosch Packaging technologies stated in a report recently that 'successful brands build oninnovative and efficient packaging solutions with high consumerbenefit.'

The firm claims that technologies can be applied that completelyredefine a product category or, in some cases, create an entirelynew product from an existing brand.

An example of pro-active packaging technology design, BoschPackaging cites the Pull Pack designed by one of its firms SigpackSystems, that worked with existing equipment and knowledge ofexisting lines to create a new package that would require minimalalteration of those lines.

"The Pull Pack enables consumers to simply pull off the short endof the wrapper for quick access to contents," says the firm.

The cost of production, and efficiencies therein, are clearly alsokey factors for the evolution of a brand; when coupled withcreative design, 'they can be a successful formula', adds Bosch,citing the advent of robots on the line.

Once thought to be too expensive and too difficult to handle byfood production and packaging facilities, according to Bosch,'robots have come down significantly in price'. The german firmcontinues that 'a robot's enhanced flexibility adds to its processand production speeds.'