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Meat Processing Innovations Return With In-Person IPPE

At IPPE 2022, where poultry and other protein processing is the primary focus, we found innovations in IQF freezing, contamination detection, bagging, thermoforming, and more. Check out our video highlights.


Quick hits:

  • Messer shows off its new Wave Impingement Freezer, which uses nitrogen instead of CO2, along with other important innovations.
  • Combining 7.6 m worth of equipment into 4.7 m of space, Wipotec-OCS has equipment that includes metal detection, vision, X-ray, checkweighing, and more. In R&D now, it’s set for release later this year.
  • Sealed Air had several new pieces of equipment under its Cryovac brand, including the AutoID vision system; AutoLoad R2 robotic bag loader; AutoVac 86 rotary vacuum chamber system; AutoShrink, AutoChill, and AutoDry Tunnels; and several others.
  • At IPPE 2022, JLS Automation highlighted its Talon pick-and-place thermoformer loading machine, including a hygienic robot from Codian.

Related to this episode:    

  • Another way Messer is alleviating the CO2 shortage is with a nitrogen chilling system, also released at IPPE 2022.
  • See how the JLS Automation Talon pick-and-place system was used to produce soft and delicate PEEPS chicks and bunnies.
  • Stay tuned for full videos from IPPE. Meanwhile, find other videos and articles highlighting equipment shown at PACK EXPO Las Vegas at ProFoodWorld.com/PACKEXPO.
Listen to the story here:

Read article   Read the transcript below:

Aaron Hand: Hi. Welcome to Take Five. I’m Aaron Hand, editor-in-chief of ProFood World, and I’m here in Atlanta this week at IPPE, the International Production & Processing Expo.

I’d like to share just a few little highlights with you of what I’m seeing here. So first up is Messer launched a wave impingement freezer that addresses some key issues that all of the industry is facing right now.

Dan Morgan: We’re pleased to introduce at the show the Messer Wave Impingement Freezer. It’s a new technology that’s very timely that addresses some key market needs right now. There are three main needs that this equipment will introduce.

One, labor. Labor’s been notoriously short and, because of the performance of this unit, you reduce labor.

The second is CO2 availability. CO2 availability’s been an issue during the COVID time, and we use liquid nitrogen as the refrigerant medium, which allows greater uptime of the unit.

And the third thing is enhanced throughput. So, in the same footprint, we can do double the capacity of a typical CO2 tunnel, and can beat the performance of CO2 flighted freezer, which is historically used for IQF products.

Aaron Hand: So, Wipotec gave us a sneak peak into some R&D equipment that they’re going to be releasing later this year that combines several different detection technologies into one.

Ernest Bergeron: What we have here is one of our R&D units. This is an all-in-one unit, where we’ve taken about a little over 7 meters worth of equipment and crammed it down to about 4.5 meters.

So, we start off with our metal detection. Moving through our metal detection, we come to one of our vision systems. It’s our bottom-up vision, where we’re able to check barcodes, we’re able to check for labels, product dating. It comes into our X-ray system, and then we have a top-down vision system. And again, making sure we’re being able to check both sides of the packaging. Then, once we’re through with the inspection, we come here, and we have our checkweighing bed, where we make sure the weights are accurate.

And then, if everything is fine, that’s all well and good. But if you have to have rejection at high speeds, you want to make sure that you can reject it accurately. So this is a rejector—it has servo motors. We’re able to reject forwards and backwards and make sure that we get things in their correct bins.

Aaron Hand: Next up, Sealed Air was demonstrating several brand new pieces of equipment, including meat identification, bagging systems, chill tunnel and a dry tunnel… But in this video, we’ll see them demonstrating their innovative new rotary system.

Larry Churchwell: After autoloading the product, the product will come in the conveyor, probably a dual-infeed conveyor, and be singleized into the new AutoVac 86. This is the most innovative rotary that we’ve had to date. The rotary chamber systems has been in the United States for over 45 years, and this is our largest step forward in innovation.

After the rotary vacuum chamber machine, there’s a shrink automation system. On the first end, you have an electric shrink tunnel, you have a chill tunnel, and then a water removal system, a dry tunnel. These are brand new, innovative solutions that will be commercialized this year.

Aaron Hand: Finally, JLS Automation brought out its Talon thermoformer loading machine, featuring a hygienic robotic gripper.

Craig Souser: We’re standing in front of our Talon thermoformer loading machine, featuring a Codian very hygienic IP69K-rated robot and our B&R control platform. It’s what’s known as machine-centric automation, where there is no robot controller, everything’s done in a PLC, it’s very efficient from a code development standpoint, implementation, and an incredibly small electrical footprint.

In addition to that, again, the Codian robot is all stainless, very well suited for high sanitary applications, can handle harsh chemicals and high-pressure hot water spray for washdown duty.

Aaron Hand: Thank you for joining us today. Hope to see you at the next show.

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