Pharmaceuticals
A mix of benefits
Pro-X Nutraceuticals triples mixing capacity, reduces labour and waste thanks to Munson Machinery
A former athlete and body builder named Rod Burreson searched
for non-pharmaceutical supplements to enhance his physical condition, but none met his quality requirements, prompting him to develop and personally test his own formulations. Based on the health benefits he experienced, Burreson started a company in 1994 called Roex, which used contract manufacturers and packagers to commercialise his formulations. In 2004, he added a division called Pro-X Nutraceuticals and brought manufacturing and packaging in-house. Roex has since become a multi-million dollar manufacturer of vitamins, dietary supplements and herbals. The company is growing so rapidly that production manager Kory Seitz, realised that demand would soon exceed the capacity of the company’s only mixer, a 0.85 cubic meter ribbon blender located in the Irvine, CA, facility. The mixer was a bottleneck to the operation due to its small size, requiring that each batch be split up, requiring extra labour for feeding, weighing, discharging and cleaning. “We were constantly splitting up batches, sometimes doing several
batches to fill an order for a single product. We had to find a larger blender to keep pace with our process of making tablets, capsules and blends from dry powders,” says Seitz. In addition to increasing capacity, Pro-X wanted to comply with the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) by installing a stand-alone blender in a separate room that would include a load-bearing structure onto which bins of material would be forklifted and emptied into a hopper over the blender intake. After considering V-blenders and rotary batch mixers, the company installed a 3.1 cubic meter 700 TS 110 stainless steel rotary batch mixer from Munson Machinery, Utica, New York. Whereas the original ribbon blender has a capacity of 650 kilos, the rotary batch mixer handles up to 2,000 kilos, allowing Pro-X to triple mixing capacity. The company also realised unexpected benefits in the form of reduced labour, shorter blending cycles, ease of cleaning and minimised waste.
“Think of the productivity gains in being able to mix once
22 Solids & Bulk Handling • March 2010
www.solidsandbulk.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60