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'Combo' pack puts Tropical Cheese at ease

Checkweigher and metal detector combine to reduce giveaway and help enhance quality control for this maker of natural cheeses marketed to retail and foodservice accounts.

With its new checkweighing prowess, Tropical Cheese now checks each vacuum-packed cheese pack, such as those shown here. In all,
With its new checkweighing prowess, Tropical Cheese now checks each vacuum-packed cheese pack, such as those shown here. In all,

By 2005, Tropical Cheese Industries plans to double its business. One way the Perth Amboy, NJ, company expects to reach that lofty goal is to automate some of its packaging functions.

Early last year, for example, the small specialty cheesemaker added a new checkweigher and metal detector that have reduced product giveaway and freed operators to handle more pressing quality control tasks. And as Packaging World went to press, a label printer/applicator was also being integrated into the line. The Cornerstone(TM) checkweigher is from Hi-Speed Checkweigher (Ithaca, NY), the Zero Metal Free Zone detector from Safeline (Tampa, FL), while the print-and-apply unit is supplied by Auto-Labe (Ft. Pierce, FL).

Every week, as many as 70ꯠ packs of cheese are checkweighed on the line, which runs five days/week, 16 to 18 hours/day, followed by a washdown. The line produces cheeses that are marketed in Hispanic communities along the Eastern Seaboard, from Boston to Miami.

Cheeses are vacuum-packed on two new Multivac (Kansas City, MO) Model 3200 units. These machines were just being installed at press time. They use film rollstock from Cryovac Div., Sealed Air Corp. (Duncan, SC) that Tropical Cheese describes as a high-barrier coextrusion of nylon and Surlyn® from DuPont (Wilmington, DE).

Greater accuracy

Before adding the equipment, "we had a person on each shift who would weigh a limited [random] number of packages every hour to gain representative numbers that we used for the lot," recalls Tom Honse, vice president of operations at Tropical Cheese. "We checked about five thousand packages a week." Because that process was so imprecise, he says, giveaway "as high as two ounces per package," was measured.

The time it took for a quality control person to manually remove packages from the line, weigh them, document their weights and bring the packs back to the line was troublesome enough when Tropical Cheese was producing small volumes. But as volumes increased, so did the amount of time for checking weights. That prompted the family-owned business to look for automated equipment to do the job.

Before Tropical Cheese added any equipment, it examined several options. The caustic washdown essential to the dairy facilities' sanitation demanded rugged machinery that was easy to clean. "We wash down our entire manufacturing line every night, and the new equipment had to be able to function under harsh conditions," says Honse.

"The Cornerstone is perfect for a company like ours," Honse explains. "It can handle our caustic washdown environment. Its modular configuration makes it easy to maintain, and our giveaway is now averaging less than one ounce per package for our twelve-ounce pack."

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