This time last year, palletizing was a manual affair in the bulk packing area at Blue Diamond Growers cooperative in Sacramento, CA. But last summer the firm installed an automated palletizing system that neatly accumulates 25- and 50-lb cases from five different almond processing lines and sends them layer by layer to a smooth-running shuttle palletizer from Priority One Packaging (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada). As in years past, cases are printed with generic information by the corrugated supplier. But no longer do workers use roller printers in the warehouse to print variable information on cases, nor does Blue Diamond waste corrugated shippers by having those workers print more cases than are needed in a given shift. Instead, a software-driven ink-jet coding system from Foxjet (Arlington, TX) permits on-line printing of lot number, date code and bar code. The legibility of the codes is consistently good enough to allow bar code scanners from Accu-Sort (Telford, PA) to read them and determine, based on information in the code, which of five accumulation conveyors should receive each case. Each of the five Foxjet coders is located immediately after the five net weigh fillers responsible for filling the cases with whole, slivered, split, sliced or blanched almonds. Each high-resolution ink-jet printing system includes a Foxjet 7400 series controller connected to four printheads (two per side) and a case conveyor with integrated encoder for line speed monitoring. All printheads print images up to 1.9" tall.
On-line coding paves the way for automatic palletizing
One shuttle palletizer handles cases from five different Blue Diamond almond packaging lines thanks to on-line bar coding and reliable scanners.
Apr 30, 1996
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