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Smooth New Case Packing at Fisher Nuts

Secondary packaging on this new line includes the latest in case erecting, loading, and closing. The machines also accept three very different case styles all formed from one flat blank.

From Cabrio Case to stackable club store to regular brown kraft corrugated shipper, the end-of-line equipment in Fisher Nuts’ new line handles it all. Behind the cases is the LSP-100 robotic case loader.
From Cabrio Case to stackable club store to regular brown kraft corrugated shipper, the end-of-line equipment in Fisher Nuts’ new line handles it all. Behind the cases is the LSP-100 robotic case loader.


Closeup of the Cabrio Case (Patented & Pats. Pending).Closeup of the Cabrio Case (Patented & Pats. Pending).Sheltering at home, pantry-stocking, and baking are all the rage since COVID-19 reared its ugly head. One consequence has been that demand for snacking and baking products like those sold by Fisher Nuts has increased considerably. That led the firm to install a whole new packaging line in its Elgin, Ill., headquarters facility to keep up with the increased demand, which had been building even before the pandemic.

 Delkor secondary packaging equipment is prominent. This is by no means Fisher Nuts’ first experience with Delkor. In fact the firm was an early adopter of Delkor’s Cabrio Case® in 2016. Today Fisher Nuts has eight Delkor packaging lines, all running the Cabrio Case format for their Retail Ready Packaging (RRP) needs.

“Delkor did a fantastic job of taking their Cabrio Case concept directly to the big retailers, who are our customers, and generating interest there,” says John Schafer, Vice President of Engineering at Fisher Nuts. “By getting the big retailers excited about Cabrio Case, and providing free use of this innovative case design on their case packers, Delkor created a situation where Cabrio Case was rapidly pulled into the marketplace, so we didn’t have to sell it to our customers much at all. It’s not like we were forced into the Cabrio Case format because there are certainly other Retail Ready Packaging options out there, but they made it a whole lot easier for us to lean in Delkor’s direction because they had already done all that difficult leg work with the Walmarts of the world. In addition, the Cabrio Case was more cost effective and provided great shelf appearance for the Fisher Nuts brand.”Shown here are freshly erected Cabrio Cases entering the robotic case packer.Shown here are freshly erected Cabrio Cases entering the robotic case packer.

The idea with this new line was to provide Fisher Nuts with a case packing line that could  accomplish the following:

• accept all 40 of their different nut mix combinations

• handle each of 14 different primary package sizes—6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10.25, 11, 12, 14, 16, 22, and 23-oz

• package not just the retail-ready Cabrio Case mentioned above but also the other two corrugated shipper formats required by today’s retailers: a conventional brown kraft shipping case and a stackable club store case (see photo above for examples of each)

• perform the above tasks yet require no more than 8 min for the packaging line—case erector, robotic loader, case sealer—to change from one case style to another

All of these goals are accomplished by three Delkor machines, which we’ll explore in more detail shortly. The upstream machines feeding them include a 24-head combination scale from Ishida that sits above a KHS K260 vertical form/fill/seal machine. Integrated with the bagger is a Butler Automatic film splicing machine that, says Schafer, greatly reduces downtime caused by the need to feed in a new roll of flexible packaging film when it’s called for. Also tightly integrated with this upstream configuration of primary packaging systems is some unique product mixing equipment that makes Schafer reluctant to talk about primary packaging in any real detail. “It’s not like we’re building the space shuttle over here, but the front end of this line is pretty special so I think we’ll keep that to ourselves,” says Schafer.


See it Live at PACK EXPO Connects Nov. 9-13: SP1 Automatic Splicer Demo, by Butler Automatic Inc. Preview the Showroom Here.

See it Live at PACK EXPO Connects Nov. 9-13: SP1 Innopack Kisters TrayPaper Packer TPP, by KHS USA, Inc. Preview the Showroom Here.


One thing that he does say about the bagging machine is that it has on it two date coders. One is a Videojet thermal-transfer system and the other is a Hitachi ink-jet unit. “We print black with the thermal transfer, but if we need to do white ink, we find the ink-jet works best,” says Schafer.

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INTRODUCING! The Latest Trends for All Industries at PACK EXPO Southeast