Tray wrapper nets savings (sidebar)

In addition to putting hot-fill juice in PET bottles&#44 Old Orchard also packs about 48 million cans of frozen concentrate annually. In November&#44 secondary packaging for the 12-oz plastic cans went from an RSC to a shrink-wrapped corrugated tray.

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The driver?

“We save about a dime in materials cost with every 24-count tray” says director of manufacturing Greg Mangione.

The automated tray wrapper installed at Old Orchard is a Series 90 system from Brenton Engineering. Driven by five Allen-Bradley servo motors from Rockwell Automation the wrapper delivers speeds of more than 50 trays/min and changes over easily from 12- to 24-count trays.

Operators make electronic changes from drop-down menus on the HMI screen. Mechanical adjustments required are all done by means of knobs and handles set to digital indicators.

The wrapping system also incorporates a Marsh PatrionPlus ink-jet printer from Videojet that puts a production date code on the side of each tray.

See the story that goes with this sidebar: Redundancy rules at Old Orchard

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