Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - December 2008 - (Page 41)

Production Technology notes Michael Green, vice president of tna North America, Coppell, Texas. At the same time, he adds, bakers and snack producers are striving to reduce the cost of their operations, speciﬁcally in the price per bag area. Moreover, he says, rising energy costs are fueling the drive toward sustainable machine design. “The pressure for ‘more from less’ is what is challenging packaging departments,” Green says. “Reduce labor forces, reduced engineering department stafﬁng and support, and fewer hours for operator and maintenance training are the tenants of today’s packaging operations.” produce a variety of specialty bag formats without the need for custom-designed or dedicated systems. “The ‘kanga jaw,’ powered by a linear servo motor, adds a vertical motion while maintaining the beneﬁts of tna rotary jaw technology,” Green says. “This additional movement of up to 120 mm allows jaw path control so the jaws approach each other on a horizontal line and at zero relative motion to the ﬁlm travel.” One challenge involves producing the quad or four-sided seal bag on a VFFS system. Some companies have developed retroﬁts as well as new systems to produce these specialty bags on continuous motion machines instead of intermittent motion machines as in the past. “What that gives us is a little more speed,” Almond says. “Before, the sacriﬁce you had with an intermittent motion machine is that it made a nice square bag, but you reduced the speed. We don’t get the speed that we get on pillow pouches, but we get 15% more speed than we’d get on an intermittent-motion machine.” Speciﬁcally designed for snack foods, the Ishida Atlas-202 ﬂexible bagmaker from Heat and Control can produce pillow, hem seal, gusseted and ﬂat bottom bags without having to buy several dedicated systems. Single button callup of multiple bag formats simpliﬁes changeovers. For increased versatility, the Atlas-202 is available with automatic ﬁlm splicing, banner attachment, hole punch, tear notch, perforated and zig-zag cuts and nitrogen ﬂushing. Marketing departments, Green notes, love the look of Quattro-seal, blockbottom bags, which can be run at faster speeds on systems like tna’s robag 3. Still, he stresses, these systems need to run pillow pouches and other packaging styles that pay the bulk of the bills. “When you’ve run your one shift per week of these important but niche packaging formats [such as the four-seal format], you can run those reduced-pack-size bags at the blazing high speeds that a rotary double-jaw tna robag is renowned for,” Green says. Intelligent Problem Solving Whether they’re the challenges in maintenance, sanitation or operations, Stanford notes, companies need to ﬁnd practical solutions to reoccurring problems in dayto-day operations. “We have been able to address these concerns by using self-lubricating parts and components, by creating open designs and by providing additional services and inspection on an annual and sometimes semi-annual basis,” he says. To lower the overall cost per bag, Green adds, the tna robag 3 combines increased versatility with high-speed packaging. Speciﬁcally, tna’s ‘kanga jaw’ technology for VFFS packaging systems can Sealing the Deals Yakima, Wash.-based Arr-Tech’s inline bag sealer can produce up to 60 bags per minute with sizes ranging from 5 in. to 14 in and heights up to 4 in. in one motion. However, the latest update is the no-seal function, which allows the system to run almost completely trouble free, the company says. Once the photo eye sees a product out of spec, it sends a signaler to ﬁre the seal bars to keep them clean of foreign material and minimize sanitation. The product simply passes down the line and can be pulled off and sent to another location for packaging. Continued on page 42 Photo cour tesy of tna North Am erica www.snackandbakery.com DECEMBER 2008 - Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery 41 http://www.snackandbakery.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - December 2008

Snack Food &�Wholesale Bakery - December 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Now, That’s Haute! Bigger ‘n’ Better But Is It Art? New Products Branching Out Engineering Management Fits to a T Racing to the Finish The Final Word

Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - December 2008

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