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Special equipment for a special concept

Custom blow molding, electronic net-weigh filling in a HEPA-filtered enclosure, robotic palletizing—it all helps Superior Dairy succeed with caseless shipping. See in-plant video

Electronic net-weigh fillers are long on sanitation and accuracy.
Electronic net-weigh fillers are long on sanitation and accuracy.

Caseless shipping of dairy products is alive and well on two nearly identical lines at Superior Dairy in Canton, OH (for a close look at the philosophy behind caseless shipping, see story on page 52). Specialized equipment plays a key role in this unique approach to packaging, and because the two lines have a lot in common, a look at Line One is a good place to begin. It’s been running since ’98, but equipment has been added steadily since then.

Both ½-gal and 3-L bottles, blown in-house of white opaque HDPE, are filled on Line One. Products include not only milks in a variety of fat-content percentages but also orange juice, chocolate milk, and buttermilk. Ice cream mix for foodservice customers is also filled.

All HDPE bottles filled on the line are blown upstairs on a system supplied by Uniloy Milacron (Manchester, MI). They’re automatically bagged on a machine supplied by AIS Container Handling (Dutton, MI) and then brought down to the filling line on pallets. An operator feeds bags of bottles into a debagger, also from AIS, that slits open the bags and feeds the empty bottles down a matte-top conveyor until they reach a takeaway conveyor that runs at a right angle. This takes bottles in a single file to labeling.

The pressure-sensitive labeler, from WS Packaging-Superior Machine Systems (Mason, OH), is equipped with bottle stabilizing tools so that the light bottles remain steady as the paper labels are applied. Just before label application, a Smart-Date 2i thermal-transfer print unit from Markem (Keene, NH) applies the date code to a blank space designed into the preprinted label; it also prints nutrition facts, ingredient data, and bar-code information on the half of the label that’s left blank by the label converter.

Separate filling room

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