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Packing snacks with a 60% reduction in labour costs

31/12/2002

Summary: The packing of filled and sealed bags into cases for transit is the single most manpower-intensive part of the entire process of snack manufacture. A leading UK snack food company has reduced labour costs across the whole process (manufacture plus packing) by 60%, by installing an Ishida Flexible Packing System (FPS) to automatically pack flexible bags into cases.

Red Mill Snack Foods Limited is Britain’s market leader in branded children’s fun snacks, Big Bag meal replacement snacks and savoury pork snacks. The company, a subsidiary of Continental Foods, also manufactures and packs own-label tortilla chips for some of Europe’s top retailers.

Seeking better use of existing labour

Red Mill’s Wednesbury factory, manufacturing about 3.5 million bags of snacks each week, is located in Britain’s Midlands. Manpower is scarce in the area, owing partly to its central location within the UK, which has encouraged the growth of a strong and successful warehousing industry.

As a result, Red Mill continually seeks new ways to apply automation so that its qualified manpower can be deployed to best effect.

The old system: packing cases by hand

A typical production unit at Wednesbury producing, for example, 30g and 15g bags of ‘Transform-a-Snack’, would have operatives involved in extrusion, flavouring, weighing, bagging and casepacking. Weighing and bagging had already been automated, using Ishida multihead weighers over form-fill-seal bagmakers. Casepacking took up over half the unit’s manpower, far more than any other single operation.

After looking at several alternative approaches, Red Mill chose the new Ishida Flexible Packing System (FPS) to automate the casepacking step.

The new system

In Red Mill’s new system, instead of being fed to a packing table the bags are conveyed from the bagmaker to an Ishida seal tester with integrated pack conditioner. Bags are then checkweighed on Ishida DACS checkweighers, and collated in sets of four as they arrive at the Ishida FPS.

The pick-and-place arm of the FPS picks up a collation of four bags with one side of its suction device, then uses the other side to pick up a further collation. It places the eight bags into an open case coming
from the case erector. To fill a 48-bag case of 15g bags, the FPS makes six of these placements. Filled cases are then taped and palletised.

One-person operation

Automation of the casepacking step has reduced overall staffing needs by 60% over the whole process of production and packing. The entire casepacking operation consisting of two FPS units, each turning out 1,300 cases per shift, can be controlled for much of the time by a single person.

Scope of the project

Ishida’s participation involved manufacture and supply of the seal testers, checkweighers and casepackers, and the project management of the entire new system downstream of the bagmakers. This included automatic case erectors and case closers supplied by partner companies, and the interface with the palletising system.

Improved product presentation

“The cases leaving the factory are now more neatly packed than before”, says Richard Newnham of Red Mill.

Because automation has reduced the number of human checkpoints, special care went into the setting up of the new system. “The result has been that complaints have been reduced”, comments Mr Newnham.