KDV: Building Serious Potato Chip Production Capacity Fast

KDV wanted to be confident that, line for line, they would get the same efficiency and high-volume reliability as the largest crisp manufacturers in any market. For this reason the company chose two established world-class partners: Heat & Control for the processing and Ishida for the packing machinery.

Availability has been such that no breakdowns have occurred since the Ishida packing lines first began operating. Overall efficiency is an impressive 98%.

Ishida is the only manufacturer that designs and builds multihead weighers and bagmakers as single, integrated units for the snack food industry. It began doing so over ten years ago, in order to gain maximum understanding and control of the vital interface between these two technologies. As a result, advances in both are fully exploited and the result has been ten years of continuous improvement, tested on hundreds of high-output sites around the world.

This interface is important when handling any modern, low-pieceweight snack. In the case of potato crisps, with their tendency to float and glide, it becomes even more critical.

The Ishida packing equipment at KDV is made up of four integrated weigher-bagmaker units, installed in 2012. Each consists of a 16-head multihead weigher mounted above a pair of economy-range Atlas ECO snack food bagmakers. Each weigher is divided into two sections at the top and functions as two fast 8-head weighers, capable of feeding 95 weighments per minute to each of its bagmakers. Despite this speed, which enables the four packing lines to turn out 20 tonnes of crisps per shift, accuracy is very high.

Giveaway is never more than 2% of target weight, ensuring a high yield of saleable product. The paired arrangement, with twin bagmakers serving each multihead weigher makes for economical use of space. The Ishida packing lines handle several leading brands, with pack sizes ranging from 40g to 160g.

Even after the equipment had been ordered, new packs and target weights were being imposed on the KDV production team by the needs of the market. However the Ishida engineers have been able rapidly to produce forming tubes for each new variety without involving further major investment. An important feature of the Ishida bagmakers has been a unique rapid film splicing procedure which has cut product changeover times by an estimated 10%.

Easy to learn and simple to use, the touchscreen, multi-language interface of KDV’s new crisp packing facility widens the choice of operators available to management and makes training easier. Taken together with the easy-clean design of the Ishida equipment, one important outcome is short product changeover times (typically under 15 minutes).

As Vladimir Grankin, Technical Director of KDV Group reports “Undoubtedly the major benefits of the Ishida bagmakers for us are their excellent reliability and high productivity that allow us to respond to market demand for our products.” “In terms of technical support during the installation and operator training, the level of service is excellent. The bagmakers are easy to operate and maintain and this is another key advantage for us.”