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Retail Ready Line Provides Integrated Solution

28/09/2004

The new Retail Ready Line covers the entire fresh product weighing and packing process: tray denesting, weighing, filling, checkweighing, tray sealing, metal detection, weigh-price-labelling, automatic label inspection and automatic packing into cases or Euro crates.

The Retail Ready Line features Ishida’s state-of-the-art equipment including fresh food weigher, checkweigher, tray sealer, weigh-price-labeller and pick-and-place packer.

To maximise efficiencies and reduce waste, trays are checkweighed prior to being sealed and metal detection is carried out before the trays are labelled. Integrated reject systems remove substandard packs or incomplete cases without having to stop the line.

Elements of the Retail Ready Line

Denesting:

Using an Ishida tray denester, tray or pots are automatically denested for accurate and consistent presentation to the weighing and filling system.

Weighing & Filling:

Whilst Ishida is still the global market leader in multihead weighing technology, its new range of Fresh Food Weighers now allow for this technology to be applied to very sticky fresh foods.

Compared with weighing the product by hand on static scales, the Fresh Food Weigher reduces product giveaway from typically 10% to under 1% per pack, typically saves three operators per shift and guarantees outstanding weighing consistency.
Customised filling systems, tailored to each application, transfer each product portion into trays to ensure a spillage-free, gentle and consistent tray filling process.

Checkweighing:

The filled trays then move across an integrated checkweigher which ensures that any over- or underweight packs are identified and rejected before they are sealed. This saves packaging materials as the rejected trays can be re-used without wasting film.

Tray Sealing:

The Ishida QX 775 range of compact tray sealers can operate at up to 17 cycles or 100 packs per minute. The sealing process is extremely precise to ensure the highest seal quality and integrity. Using Inside Cut Technology, pack quality can be further enhanced and film consumption reduced by 5%. Changes of tray formats and film can be carried out in less than 8 minutes to minimise downtime.

Metal detection:

An integrated metal detector guarantees that any metal-contaminated trays are rejected and removed from the line before they are labelled.

Weigh-price-labelling:

Ishida’s pioneering WPL 5000 Weigh-Price-Labeller features a unique applicator for labelling awkward pack shapes such as whole chickens, a special label cassette system for changing labels in 10 seconds, a long life thermal printer head with a typical lifetime of one year and the ability to apply both top and bottom labels.
More follows…

Label inspection:

A special label inspection system verifies that both label data and position are accurate and automatically rejects incorrect packs to ensure 100% quality control. This allows the manufacturer to eliminate EPWs (Emergency Product Withdrawals) and RTMs (Return to Manufacturer).

Pick-and-place packing:

The Ishida ‘FPS’ pick-and-place packer features a multi-axis pick-and-place arm with a selection of pick-and-place heads that can be specified to handle different tray- and pack types. The system optimises packing line efficiency and typically saves two manual packers per shift.

The case packing pocess also incorporates constant weight checking to reject incomplete cases and crates, while data from the weigh-price-labeller is used to label the filled crates and cases as they exit the FPS for effective quality control.

“Retailers and consumers are placing even greater demands on fresh product processors and this in turn has created new challenges for the packaging industry,” comments Paul Griffin, Ishida Europe’s Marketing Director.

“Larger volumes, faster throughput, increased flexibility, shorter lead times, maximum efficiency and high quality standards are all critical areas where packaging equipment manufacturers have had to respond.

“We believe our new Retail Ready Line provides a total solution that addresses these issues. Importantly, while it provides a fully integrated line, it is made up of individual pieces of equipment which means each individual element can be tailored to the exact customer requirements.”