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Finnish bake-off supplier finds Ishida is key to accurate packing

31/12/2002

Vaasan & Vaasan Oy is one of Finland’s leading bakers, with annual sales of about 350M Euros. In 1990, at its Joutseno site, the company began producing frozen bake-off products (i.e. products requiring further baking before consumption) for its own local bakeries. These were manually packed, in cartons containing somewhere between 35 and 40 pieces.

The need for accuracy

It soon became clear that the demand for bake-off products extended far outside Vaasan & Vaasan, and the company began supplying other organisations. At this point, the variation in pack content was no longer acceptable. Juha Eronen, Technical Manager at Joutseno, takes up the story.

“We looked at counting the product on the conveyor belt using photocells. Unfortunately this was not a satisfactory approach. It was possible for one piece to hide another, and false counts could be caused by even small pieces of product debris.”

Wanted: a cost-effective way of scaling up production

“At this point, we also began to sell bake-at-home retail packs containing nine pieces”, says Eronen, “so that every count had to be correct.”

“Sales were rising, and current system was too manpower intensive to be scaled up economically. In addition, it was clear that cartons were inappropriate and we would need to use plastic bags.”

“We had to consider buying a modern bagmaker. It was clear that we would need a fast weighing system to take full advantage of a bagmaker’s speed.”

In late 1999, the company made the decision to adopt multihead weighing. An Ishida 10-head multihead weigher with 5-litre hoppers was installed at the end of the year.

Capacity increased, giveaway reduced

Before installing the Ishida weighing machines, the packing line was turning out between 20 and 22 tonnes of product per day, with a giveaway of 15%. The daily production is now 45 tonnes, and the weighing process is 99.7% accurate, reducing giveaway to near zero.

Training implications of new technology

“I myself was familiar with Ishida and their multihead weighers from my time in the confectionery industry”, says Juha Eronen, “but at that time we had no in-house operator experience of multihead weighers, so it was quite a step into the unknown from that point of view. However, the weighing machine was not difficult to use, and Ishida had the local resources to ensure we had the training we needed.”

Successfully coping with market demand for years to come

After less than a year’s operation it became clear that the accuracy of the Ishida weighing machine was not only ensuring customer satisfaction across wholesale, catering and consumer markets, but also keeping giveaway within much tighter limits. The multihead-bagmaker combination was also less manpower-intensive in operation. Vaasan & Vaasan purchased another Ishida multihead weigher, and now operates 5 production lines and two packing stations for its bake-off products. It currently holds 40% of the Finnish retail bake-off market.