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Coffee capsule lines extraordinaire

Close collaboration between Barrie House Coffee & Tea and a dedicated core of packaging machinery OEMs yielded four sophisticated lines each capable of running 300 single-serve coffee capsules/min.

The robotic pick head of the cartoner first uses vacuum cups to pick K-Cups from the collation station.
The robotic pick head of the cartoner first uses vacuum cups to pick K-Cups from the collation station.

Launched in Brooklyn in 1934, coffee roaster Barrie House Coffee & Tea now occupies a 90,000-sq ft plant in Elmsford, NY, about 27 miles north of New York City. The third and fourth generation members of the Goldstein family who now own and operate the firm are about as advanced as anyone on the planet when it comes to one particular aspect of their full-line coffee and tea business: filling, inspecting, date coding, cartoning, case packing, and palletizing of single-serve coffee capsules.

The lineup of automated machinery they’ve assembled is quite remarkable, which we’ll see in a minute. But equally impressive is the Barrie House coffee capsule itself, that little container of ground coffee that goes into a Keurig Machine to produce a single serving of coffee. Its supplier is considered proprietary for the time being. But it’s thermoformed from a coextrusion of PP/EVOH/PP. That makes it notably different from the polystyrene K-Cup popularized by Keurig Green Mountain, which is the largest producer in the K-Cup category and, technically at least, the owner of the trademarked K-Cup® term. Keurig’s patent covering the design of K-Cups expired in 2012, at which point a number of others (Mother Parkers Coffee, Copper Moon, Treehouse Foods) began making single-serve coffee capsules that are compatible with either the Keurig-branded brewing machine or the Keurig-style brewing machines now made by the likes of Hamilton Beach, Faberware, and Proctor Silex.

Many marketers of single-serve coffee capsules today still rely on a cup that is thermoformed of polystyrene and includes a layer of EVOH for oxygen barrier purposes. A paper filter goes into the capsule to keep grounds from getting into one’s coffee cup. The third component, a foil lid, is heat sealed into the cup. In the brewing machine, one needle punctures the lid and another punctures the bottom of the cup. Hot water flows into the cup through the hole in the lid. Out through the bottom of the cup flows freshly brewed coffee.

The single-serve coffee capsule has been widely criticized because polystyrene is rarely if ever recycled. That’s why Green Mountain Keurig is in the middle of a transition out of polystyrene to an injection-molded PP/EVOH cup, a transition it hopes to have complete by 2020.

When Barrie House started thinking about getting into the coffee capsule business, which was as early as 2008, management made sustainable packaging a key objective from the get-go. Initially, biodegradable materials were explored. But according to Director of Sales and Marketing Shay Zohar, it was quickly determined that because commercial-scale composting is not widely available in the U.S., it made more sense to aim for recyclability than biodegradability.

Zohar goes on to say that the first fully recyclable capsule the firm developed was injection molded from a monolayer polypropylene. Included in the PP pellets from which the cup was molded was an oxygen scavenger to prolong shelf life. This format, which had to be designed in such a way that it would not infringe on the Keurig patent, made it successfully to the marketplace in late 2010. But Zohar and Barrie House CEO David Goldstein came to the conclusion that this injection-molded cup couldn’t be made efficiently in the kinds of volumes they had established as their goal. So back to the drawing board they went, and by 2013 the thermoformed coffee capsule currently in use began reaching the marketplace. One element of its predecessor that was retained is the pull tab on the foil lid that lets consumers easily remove lid from cup so that the foil can go into the aluminum waste stream while the PP goes into its own waste stream. More on the lids, which come from Israel and a firm named Tadbik Group, shortly.

Patented cup
According to Zohar, the coffee capsule now in use, which is patented by Barrie House, represents a dramatic improvement over the first one that Barrie House brought to market. Not only can it be thermoformed more efficiently and at higher throughput than its injection-molded predecessor, it weighs 2.6 g instead of 6.8. And the EVOH barrier layer keeps the coffee fresher than the oxygen absorber in the previous cup was able to. Shelf life is two years.

As successful as they were in developing a functional and recyclable capsule, Zohar and colleagues struggled mightily when it came to automated primary and secondary packaging equipment. The situation was so bad that it soon became clear that the firm had two choices. Either walk away from the single-serve coffee capsule market or double down and make a serious investment in all new equipment. “We decided as a company to double down,” says Zohar.

Through Tadbik, the Israel-based supplier of foil lids, Zohar was introduced to another Israeli firm named Pack Line Ltd., and in short order Pack Line’s PXM-6 filling and sealing machine was selected as the one that would meet Barrie House’s requirements. Nuspark, a Canadian OEM that had previous experience with capsule packaging on other installations, became the provider of the specialized secondary and tertiary packaging systems needed at Barrie House. A third key machine supplier that provided the all-important auger fillers integrated into the Pack Line system was All-Fill Inc.

“All of these guys were amazing,” says Zohar. “We were able to build the first line in less than five months, which is unheard of when you’re talking about a complete production line and much of it is custom. Don’t forget, too, that our unique capsule is not an easy one to handle. It takes a very deep filter, and we’re putting 18 g of coffee into it while most of the industry is averaging 10 g and maxing out at 12 g.”

By July of 2013 Line One was humming. But rather than resting on their laurels, says Zohar, “We decided to build another line that would be even better. By August of 2014, it was done, and as soon as we saw it in operation we immediately ordered two more just like it. The technology we’re taking advantage of now compared to Line One is like night and day, which is partly why we now run at 300 capsules per minute rather than the 240 that Line One topped out at. In fact, Line One is now shut down as we upgrade it with the advancements we developed after it got its start.”

Zohar once again emphasizes how essential it was that his firm was willing to view key machine suppliers as partners in a collaborative process. “We’ve given them 100% access to all the cameras in the production areas. They have full access into software, they see our workflow, our work volume, our efficiency, our alarms. Everything we have is fed live to them. By our sharing information this way they can really understand what’s happening on their machines. Only by seeing it in real time can they have this kind of deep understanding. It’s an approach that allowed all of us to do amazing things.”

A big part of the real-time visibility he speaks of is delivered by an industrial M2M router and data gateway from eWon called Flexy. All connections run through industry standard VPN protocols to guarantee a safe and secure connection that prevents network intrusions. OPC UA technology offers interoperability between platforms from multiple vendors and enables new machines as well as legacy PLCs for IoT integration. “We share and collect all data in and out of the production line via the eWON hardware with custom software written by Pack Line’s chief engineer and software genius, Eyal Dafna,” says Zohar.

Line Four
Of the three lines in operation on the day of our plant visit, we chose to focus on Line Four, which was producing 24-count cartons that were being case-packed four cartons per case. Immediately noticeable is the innovative method of feeding empty capsules into the Pack Line PXM-6. An operator removes a slug of 100 cups from the corrugated case in which they arrive and places it in a flighted incline conveyor. Up at the top of the machine, the slugs drop from the incline conveyor into a second flighted conveyor, this one being horizontally oriented. Its six flights position the six slugs in front of six capsule magazines from which capsules are denested and placed into the six-across filling machine. When these magazines require fresh slugs of capsules, the horizontal flighted conveyor holding the six fresh slugs pivots to a vertical position so that the slugs drop neatly into the six magazines. Then the cycle repeats itself. According to Zohar, an operator can fill this denesting system with enough capsules to last about an hour and 12 minutes before he needs to replenish it again.

Meanwhile, at the bottom of the six capsule magazines, capsules are picked by vacuum cups mounted on tooling driven by a Unidrive M700 servo motor from Emerson’s Control Techniques. The capsules are drawn down into the six-across pockets of the carrier mechanism that takes them through a number of operations. With each stroke of the servo-driven picking device, mechanical fingers separate the bottom cup to be picked from the nested ones above it so as to simplify the task of cleanly picking it and placing it into its assigned pocket.

Next comes insertion of filter paper, but first is a station where six Model GV-H45 laser inspection systems from Keyence make sure that each pocket in the carrier mechanism has a capsule in it. If a capsule is missing, or if a misshapen capsule or two capsules at once are detected, that pocket will be “remembered” during the rest of the process so that no filter paper is inserted, no coffee is deposited, and no foil lid is placed.

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