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Snack bar packaging at 500 products/min

Food producer Nature’s Path installs an automatic packaging line for its organic rice and granola bars that provides up to six times the output of its previous system.

Pw 56025 Naturespath 55

Since its beginnings in 1985, Nature’s Path has prided itself on providing a variety of 100% percent organic food products, including cereals and granola bars. Based in Richmond, BC, Canada, the family-owned company produces products that are both Fair Trade- and non GMO-certified. This has benefits up and down the supply chain, from farmer to consumer. Health-conscious consumers of all ages soon caught on to the company´s delicious and nutritious products—so much so that demand began to outpace production.

In particular, Nature’s Path’s granola and rice bars, such as the Peanut Choco Granola Bars and Chocolate Crispy Rice Bars, became so popular that the company needed to upgrade its packaging line to boost output. The delicate and sticky granola bars often broke on the existing machine, jamming the system and necessitating frequent downtime for cleaning.

Nature’s Path partnered with Bosch Packaging Systems and manufacturers’ representative Charles Downer & Co., Ltd. for a completely reengineered bar-packaging line for its Blaine, WA, facility that doubled processing speed and quadrupled run time, resulting in up to six times the output of the previous solution.

Seamless transition
To find the best solution for the challenging rice and granola bars, Nature’s Path approached several packaging companies, including Bosch, and surveyed their solutions. Nature’s Path had previously worked with Bosch to wrap its signature toaster pastries using a Doboy flow wrapper. It became clear that Bosch’s bar-packaging line provided the most advantageous and efficient system.

Nature’s Path’s previous system featured one wrapper, a cartoner, and a case packer with manual palletizing. The new system, a Bosch bar-packaging line, is designed as a single, seamless system, rather than as a chain of machines. To achieve a reliable and optimized production flow, the speeds of all components in the bar-packaging line are balanced to eliminate bottlenecks and minimize downtime. As a result, the completely automated line runs at speeds to 500 products/min—more than double that of the previous solution. In addition, the new wrapping material dimensions conform closer to the actual product, reducing the material needed and resulting in a 6% savings on primary wrapping and tri-seal carton materials. The bar-packaging line has been so successful that Nature’s Path has plans to add a second leg to further increase production.

“The bar-packaging line is meeting all original design specifications,” says John Oucharek, Director of Engineering at Nature’s Path. “We’re now positioned to add a second leg if production capacity requires it.”

Sticky situation
While consumers may treasure the gooey, sticky characteristics of Nature’s Path’s rice and granola bars, these features of the snack bars present particular packaging challenges. Because the products are so sticky and prone to breakage, production on the previous equipment had to be halted every two to three hours due to extensive buildup of damaged products. The new bar-packaging line’s noncontact infeed guides the product with minimal breakage, allowing the system to run at double the speed of the old line and up to eight hours before cleaning. This quadruples production time and output by up to a factor of six.

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