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Wealth of Features Seal Ishida Success at Cheesemaker

15/11/2005

An Ishida QX775 Tray Sealer, tailored to meet the precise requirements of specialist cheese manufacturer Abergavenny Fine Foods, has enabled the company to substantially improve production efficiency and throughput on its oven bake breaded cheese production line.

In addition to its speed, other key benefits of the QX775 tray sealer for the company include highly accurate and precise control of the MAP-V (Modified Atmosphere Packaging with Vacuum) process, excellent sealing properties with Ishida’s unique inside cut technology, flexibility and ease of operation, fast changeovers, and proven durability and reliability, as well as efficient pack presentation using an Ishida tray denester.

Established in 1987 making hand made goat’s cheese, Abergavenny Fine Foods now offers an extensive portfolio of quality dairy products. These include an expanded range of goat’s cheeses, a wide selection of oven bake bread crumb coated cheeses, blended delicatessen rounds and special application and catering cheeses, supplied under its own brand names (for the UK and a large export market) and to all the country’s leading retailers.

Increasing demand for the company’s oven bake cheeses – such as Breaded Camembert, Breaded Mozzarella Fingers and Salmon and Cream Cheese Bakes – meant that the company needed to greatly increase its production capacity. However, due to space limitations in the factory, the new tray sealer had to fit into a very tight space.

The compact dimensions, advanced technology and a line speed of 50 trays per minute mean the QX775 tray sealer readily met both these requirements. However, the customer’s choice for an Ishida tray sealer was due to a number of other equally vital factors, as Richard Bowman, Process Development Manager at Abergavenny Fine Foods explains:

“The QX775 tray sealer has so many user friendly features” he comments. “And because we are dealing directly with the manufacturer, rather than through an agent, we have immediate access to all Ishida’s knowledge and expertise. This has not only meant excellent service back-up and fast response to any problems, it has also allowed us to give Ishida feedback on how the tray sealer machine is performing, which in turn has enabled the company to tailor certain features to meet our exact requirements.”

One example of this has been the line operators’ ability to control the speed of the infeed conveyor. Coated cheese products for example exit the IQF tunnel and feed onto a conveyor from which they are placed by hand into the trays prior to sealing. With many different products and a wide variety of tray formats – one design for example includes 12 individual compartments for bite size products – the time it takes to fill the trays can vary considerably. Instead of having a pre-set programme for each product, which would be complicated and inflexible, operators can instead use the Ishida Remote Control Unit (RCU) to vary the speed of the in feed conveyor independently.

Similarly, as part of the turnkey design package, Ishida devised a bespoke transfer system to move product from the production line to the tray-filling line. The system deals with a wide variety of products without the need for any adjustments or change parts.

Abergavenny Fine Foods uses nitrogen for its MAP process as the company has found this delivers a better taste profile among all its products. In this procedure air is first expelled by creating a vacuum before the nitrogen is injected. Here, says Mr Bowman, the QX 775 tray sealer’s ability to accurately control this process is a vital advantage, as it needs to consistently achieve very low residual oxygen levels.

“Many of our packs include dips in a pre-sealed tub,” he explains. “When the vacuum is created within the trays, there is a danger that the tubs could burst their seals. However, the Ishida tray sealer creates the vacuum and injects the nitrogen very accurately and within a very short and precise time window to ensure this does not happen.”

The sealed trays also include a peel tab for maximum consumer convenience.

Software-controlled servo drives ensure consistent film speed, tension and cut-off lengths to create a smooth and efficient sealing operation that maintains high quality pack presentation and reduces wear of machine parts. On-screen adjustment of the film tension, combined with the QX775’s film pullback feature, allow consistent sealing quality and mean the film is released quickly in order to avoid it being trapped in the tool once the sealing process is completed.

Ishida’s ’Inside Cut’ technology ensures that no film extends beyond the tray edges to maximise pack appearance and reduces film consumption by 5%. In addition, since film cutting takes place away from the product, any potential damage to either the product or the knives is minimised.

The QX775 tray sealer features two sets of tooling for different size trays but within these overall dimensions are a huge number of formats. The 12-cavity tray in particular had proved difficult to denest in the past and to solve this problem Ishida has installed a de-nester that uses a special screw system to create smooth and consistent separation of the nested trays and placement onto the chain-and-peg conveyor.

Normal production time pressures – plus the need to be able to respond quickly to last-minute changes in customer orders – mean that fast product changeovers are another pre-requisite for the tray sealer at Abergavenny Fine Foods. Both the de-nester’s and the QX775 tray sealer’s tooling can be changed within ten minutes. “With some tray sealers the changeover can be as much as 45 minutes and this is totally unacceptable, especially where most of the staff cannot carry out their main task during this period,” says Mr Bowman.

“Specialist products need specialist equipment,” he continues. “With Ishida, this specialisation is already part of the standard specification of the machine and it can then be tailored further to particular requirements.

“In the end you get what you pay for and the investment we have made in the QX775 tray sealer has been fully justified by the speed gains, saving on downtime, excellent reliability, flexibility and quality of the sealed packs, as well as the very high level of knowledge and support from Ishida Europe – benefits that you are unlikely to find with a low-cost supplier.”

The QX775 seals a huge variety of tray formats