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Cotton inserter doubles fill rate, halves labor costs

Nutritional supplement maker Lifeplus meets market demands while improving its filling and packaging line productivity.

David Burrus, Plant Manager at Lifeplus, stands next to the company’s CS10 cotton inserting machine.
David Burrus, Plant Manager at Lifeplus, stands next to the company’s CS10 cotton inserting machine.

For manufacturers and packagers of either pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals, the need to maximize machinery productivity and manage costs, all while addressing rising consumer product demand, is a constant challenge.

That was the situation for Lifeplus Intl., a Batesville, AR-based producer of nutritional supplements Although increased consumer demand is a positive, Lifeplus has found that meeting those needs isn’t always easy. The company’s sales were boosted as the general supplement market boomed. Lifeplus’s sales continued to move northward with the launch of Daily BioBasicsTM nutritional drinks, TVM Plus multivitamin and mineral supplement, and Lifeplus Joint Formula.

All products are manufactured and packaged at the company’s Batesville headquarters facility, yet most orders are shipped to customers in Europe. “The Europeans pay a lot of attention to quality and nutrient bioavailability whereas many Americans look for the lowest cost per pill,” explains David Burrus, Plant Manager at Lifeplus. “We were usually too busy trying to get ahead of incoming orders to focus on educating the American market about supplement quality.”

Cottoning ‘bottleneck’

The company’s tablet filling line accommodates bottles ranging in size from 120 cc to 300 cc. It is flexible as well, with product changeovers required as many as four times a day. Those changeovers must be done with minimal downtime.

The line’s former cotton inserter was a constant headache, according to Burrus. The machine relied on a series of knives to cut the cotton from a roll into individual pieces, a design that required frequent stoppages for sharpening. It also created a constant safety hazard for the maintenance team. Each changeover required manual machine realignment through a trial-and-error process.

Particularly vexing was that the cotton often rose up into the neck of the bottle as bottles conveyed to the downstream capper, preventing the lid from sealing properly and sending considerable product to the reject bin.

Despite the cotton inserter's shortcomings, it wasn't until the Lifeplus team saw an automated cotton inserting machine at a packaging trade show that appeared able to solve many of its production problems that it realized buying the new machine was necessary.

Cottoner benefits

Called the PharmafillTM CS2, the new cotton inserter comes from Deitz Co. It automatically separates the cotton from a continuous roll into individual pieces up to 9 in. long, shapes them into an inverted “U,” then inserts them into the center of solid dosage bottles with 100% accuracy.

The machine can insert as many as nine cotton pieces/bottle for extra dunnage, with bottles standing up to 9 in. H. But the features that most interested Lifeplus were the machine’s pinch roller system, which separates the cotton from the roll without requiring blades or cutting of any kind, and a secondary (and optional) tamper system that automatically pushes the cotton deeper into the bottle to prevent those problems downstream at the capper that Lifeplus had experienced with its previous inserter.

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