Flexible packaging

Fresh pasta maker romances long shelf life

Romance Foods pasteurizes its cooked, packaged pastas using a combination microwave/convection oven to achieve 75-day refrigerated shelf life.

January 31, 2001

Filling/capping, liquid & viscous: Page 55

Cartoning

Building sales through versatility

Tokyo-based cosmetics giant Kosé installs two modular, quick-change bottling lines versatile enough to handle nearly 100 different bottle shapes and sizes.

January 31, 2001

Conveying & accumulation

Robson's assembles a honey of a line

Filling, capping and labeling jars of honey by hand was too slow at this Arizona honey maker, especially with new markets on the horizon. Automated machinery was the answer

January 31, 2001

Conveying & accumulation

Paired vf/f/s equipment 'brews' foodservice packs

By adding two vf/f/s machines, Mother Parker’s Tea & Coffee meets growing sales demand for small bags of ground coffee sold primarily to restaurants and hotels.

November 30, 2000

Conveying & accumulation

Dueling technologies spell success

At Japan’s Daiwa Can, one aseptic PET line uses in-line mold/blow/fill. Right beside it, another line blows bottles and sterilizes them in a second operation just before filling.

October 31, 2000

Conveying & accumulation

Quintuplets!

New automated labeling system delivers five labels onto each glass bottle of Labrot & Graham’s premium bourbon whiskey, boosting output, reducing labor costs and improving placement accuracy.

October 31, 2000

Feeding/inserting/unscrambling

Ocean Spray rides a new bus

On a new Craisins line at Ocean Spray, point-to-point wiring between machine devices and their master PLC has been replaced on some machines by an open fieldbus called AS-i. Installation time is slashed, while in-plant flexibility is maximized.

September 30, 2000

Filling/capping, liquid & viscous

Filamatic, a division of National Instrument LLC: Aseptic packaging

A total of 8 servo-driven filling heads fill as many as 200 containers/min on National Instrument’s (Baltimore, MD) Filamatic® RFS-800 monobloc system.

August 31, 2000

Filling/capping, liquid & viscous

A clever strategy for plastic beer bottles

Michigan Brewing sees great potential for beer in plastic when the target market is tightly focused. Custom-labeled bottles for a casino, for instance, have found a receptive audience.

August 31, 2000

Filling/capping, liquid & viscous

Labatt drives toward networked bottling lines (sidebar)

Sophisticated HMI

August 31, 2000

Conveying & accumulation

Labatt drives toward networked bottling lines

Labatt Breweries upgrades bottling line conveyors with compact drives that smooth production, enhance network communications and simplify troubleshooting.

August 31, 2000

Filling/capping, liquid & viscous

All-Fill Inc: Volumetric filler

Model 305 single-head piston filler from All-Fill (Exton, PA) handles liquids, creams, pastes and other viscous products in fills from 50 mL to 2 ½ L.

June 30, 2000

Filling/capping, liquid & viscous

Oden Corporation: High-performance fillers

New Servo/Fill™ volumetric liquid filler from Oden (Buffalo, NY) combines performance with low cost. Features easy changeover with 50 stored set-ups.

June 30, 2000