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Vertical cartoners cope with 24,000 lb of pouched candy per hour

A custom control system and a clever arrangement of sensors developed by Ferrara engineering control help Ferrara’s five cartoners keep up with pouched candy.

BAGGER, CARTONER. Pouches of fruit snacks move through a combination scale.
BAGGER, CARTONER. Pouches of fruit snacks move through a combination scale.

When Ferrara Pan Candy Co. and Farley’s & Sathers merged in June of 2012, management of the new company, Ferrara Candy Co., Inc., discovered that greater manufacturing efficiencies could be gained by reorganizing certain operations.

Among the plants involved, few were affected more heavily than the one in Bellwood, IL, just a few miles east of Ferrara headquarters in Oak Brook Terrace, IL. The Bellwood plant is where products like Black Forest Fruit Snacks are produced in prodigious quantities and packaged in single-serve pouches that then go into folding cartons. Also pouched and cartoned here are a variety of fruit snacks made on a contract manufacturing basis for other brand owners.

The packaging equipment that handles this massive product output occupies what was formerly warehouse space in the Bellwood plant, and it includes the following pieces of packaging equipment:

• 15 high-speed combination weigh scales from Multipond situated on a mezzanine above the baggers. Why Multipond? “Because each one of them has to be capable of making 320 weighments per minute,” says Project Manager/Packaging Engineer Wendell Davis. “When it comes to that kind of speed, Multipond has figured it out.”

• 15 vertical form/fill/seal twin-tube baggers—one for each Multipond on the mezzanine above—from GEA; each twin-tube bagger is equipped with two Safeline metal detectors and two thermal-transfer coders from Videojet

• an impressive arrangement of conveyors from Dorner that move pouched candy from baggers to any one of five Smalley storeveyors

• five combination scales—some from Yamato and some from Ishida—that receive pouched candy from the storeveyors and deliver it to cartoners below them

• five cartoners, the three newest of which are from PMI Cartoning Inc.

Mettler Toledo checkweighers to ensure that manually filled corrugated cases contain the correct number of cartons

• A variety of case tapers and case coders. “In the reorganization we inherited a variety of tapers and coders,” says Davis. “But we are in the process of standardizing on Wexxar/Bel case tapers and case coders from Markem Imaje.”

A ‘dual system’
“We view it as a dual system,” Davis continues. “Seven scale/bagger systems receive freshly made product from either Mogul 5 or Mogul 6 and produce about 2,240 pouches/min. Right beside them are the other eight scale/bagger systems, which receive product from Mogul 5 or 6 and package about 2,400 pouches/min.”

And what, pray tell, is a Mogul? It’s a highly specialized and complex starch molding system used in candy manufacturing. For the purposes of this story, the only important thing to know about Moguls 5 and 6 at Ferrara is that they churn out 12,000 pounds of finished gummies and other fruit snacks per hour and that they’re set up to feed directly into the primary, secondary, and tertiary packaging equipment whose job it is to package that candy.

“We usually run two shifts a day six days a week,” says Davis. “The Moguls are the part you don’t want to mess with. Once they’re running, you want to keep them running.”

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