Line of business

By Ulrich Nielsen, Ishida

Ulrich Nielsen talks about the types of challenges that bring food manufacturers and packers to his door.

“Everyone knows the importance of safety in meat packing, but recently Ishida implemented a system to make the process of packing salads traceable throughout for a major European salad producer.”
-Ulrich Nielsen, Ishida

Specialising in the complex interactions between packing line units, Ishida Solutions is the new department of Ishida Europe that provides innovative solutions to optimise overall plant and line efficiency. Every member of the team can draw on some 15 and 25 years of ground-breaking experience within the global food industry, and are available for consultation in one-off sessions or regular update meetings, and follow a project through to completion.

Dealing mainly with companies large enough to have strong views about such issues as efficiency, return on investment or return on floor space, Ishida are proud to offer their clients solutions, not products. General consultations lead on to more focused investigations and discussions, followed by concrete proposals with firm improvement objectives. There are a number of factors driving this, including the need to improve profitability of the packing operation through greater efficiency, to make products and processes safer, to improve product quality, cut waste, and reduce labour.

Efficiency: a major driver

Taking advantage of the automation technology that's out there right now, and combining it in the right way, can improve the efficiency of the packaging line, consequently maximising profit.

A classic example is the poultry industry, where the eight pieces from a standard cut chicken are, in many companies, still packed using graders. This is a relatively slow process involving significant manual labour. It would slow things down even more to weigh first the wings, then legs, then breasts, so you end up with several graders, each taking up considerable floor space and a lot of people, just to run chicken packing on a modest scale.

The right automation technology could allow you to set up an operation processing, for example, 24,000 birds per hour using smaller, fewer machines and with reduced labour.

In this example you save money by packing more product per shift, as well as benefiting from an increased floor space and a saving of 40 percent on labour costs. Weighing on modern equipment is not only faster but much more accurate, and one can readily increase packed products by significant amounts.

The role of safety in packing line innovation

Just looking, for example, at the rate at which lawsuits against caterers are multiplying, you can see how safety concerns are very close to profitability concerns.

Everyone knows the importance of safety in meat packing, but recently Ishida implemented a system to make the process of packing salads traceable throughout for a major European salad producer. This new system can tell you, from the unique pack number, where the salad came from, the exact gas mixture used during sealing and the temperature of the product. It is possible to recover the X-ray of each particular pack, a photograph of the label, the checkweigher data and the seal tester information. Any claim that, for example, there was a stone or a piece of metal in that pack is therefore going to be categorically provable or disprovable.

The impact of quality

An example of the impact of quality that comes to mind is current thinking on organic food, and the conviction that 'better' means more real. As a result, meals made with fresh ingredients will have a perceived advantage over those made with frozen ingredients. Many of the recent advances enable packing lines to handle fresh meat, or meat in a sticky sauce, just about as rapidly and accurately as hard, frozen meat pieces, making this an area in which quality can be immediately improved.

Reducing packaging materials

Brand-owners and packers seek to use less materials per pack, and to cut down on materials wastage in order to save money. For a useful analysis of this kind of challenge it is necessary to look at the process as a whole. Take, for example, the production of trays of sliced meat. There are often differences in the size of meat slices, so in order to avoid product over-hanging the seal area the tray size is chosen to match the largest slice size. One of Ishida's interventions involved automatic previewing of the slices, linked to a system for turning trays wide-side-on to larger slices as necessary; this enabled a reduction of the standard the standard tray size by 10 percent, with a corresponding saving in tray material.

In order to reduce costs on tray sealing, Ishida have also been pioneering ways of stretching film over the sealing tool, saving on film by reducing its thickness. Following this, they devised a way of freeing the film web from the tool after sealing, delivering further savings.

During an audit of major packing plant, attention was drawn to the question of getting the right empty trays to the right packing line at the right time; a serious challenge in a busy, high volume packing operation. The operation was quite labour intensive, and inevitably many trays were ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time, causing costly delays and, due to the hygiene regulations, a high volume of wasted trays. Ishida devised a greatly simplified system for delivering trays to lines, that allowed one person to easily service seven packing lines, meaning an 80 percent reduction in the labour involved and virtually eliminated the chance for error.

Rationalising pallet handling

Another aspect of production that can eat up labour, time and profit is pallet handling. Here, a key source of production hold-ups is when the part of the palletising system serving one line goes wrong, forcing all to stop. Using a modular system, it is possible to allow palletising for each line to operate independently, dramatically reducing hold-ups, and still to reduce the necessary labour by around 90 percent. Furthermore there are other features that can be built in, such as the ability to handle mixed pallets suitable for delivery to a relatively low volume of retail outlets, for example, or a facility to use the empty pallets to pass materials back to the line as they are needed.

Biography

Ulrich Carlin Nielsen is Business Development Manager-Large Solutions for Ishida Europe Ltd and a member of the board. He has spent the last 25 years using his in-depth application knowledge to design food factories, including those for some of the world’s largest food manufacturers, as well as developing new machines and registering several patents along the way.