MATERIALS HANDLING & CONVEYING FEATURE TOP BANANA TRANSPORTATION SOLUTION FOR FYFFES
Pallets of bananas travel along the conveyor to the automatic turntable
Fyffes’ £520,000 project to automate its Normanton, West Yorkshire facility was won by LB Foster Materials Handling. The contract included the manufacture and installation of production lines and an accumulating pallet conveyor. "We outgrew our Wakefield depot so
located a bigger site to give us an increased production capacity of up to 50%,” explains operations director George Kennedy. "We needed a safe and efficient way of transporting the pallets of bananas from the unloading bays around the edge of our large production area to the ripening rooms. We required
six complete production lines to include belt and roller conveyors together with packing benches for up to 160 staff. "We chose LB Foster because they had
a better understanding of our brief including the price and demonstrated a willingness to understand what the job really entailed." Boxes of bananas arrive by lorry on
pallets. They are green as they have been picked in a fully mature but unripened condition. The ripening process is suspended during the journey as the bananas are kept at a temperature of 13 degrees. Inside the DC the bananas begin
their journey around the ripening and processing plant on the accumulating pallet conveyor. They are loaded by forklift truck and travel to an automatic turntable in the corner of the packaging area. This corrects the orientation of the pallets and they proceed directly to an offloading station adjacent to the ripening rooms. Next stop is one of the six production lines where operatives working at ergonomically designed packing benches carefully take the ripe fruit out of the boxes and carry out quality and grading checks. Bananas which fall short of the major
retailers' specification are separated out and placed on an upper level belt conveyor for other markets. Those which pass the strict quality control procedure are repackaged ready for retail sale. Some are bagged by weight, some by
number of fruit, depending on retailers’ particular requirements. The bags are then put back into boxes and placed onto a roller conveyor which runs down the centre of the packing benches. This takes them to the loading bay to be palletised ready for despatch to the supermarkets.
LB Foster Materials Handling T: 0116 276 1691
www.conveyors.co.uk
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QUALITY PALLET STRETCH WRAPPING SOLUTIONS
SEMI AUTOMATIC & FULLY AUTOMATIC PALLET STRETCH WRAPPING MACHINES MANUFACTURED TO THE HIGHEST QUALITY USING ROBUST COMPONENTS, IDEAL FOR FACTORY OR WAREHOUSE/LOGISTICS ENVIROMENTS, LEASE FINANCE AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.
Please contact 0845 265 7570 Fax: 0845 265 7571 Email:
info@phs-uk.com Website:
www.phs-uk.com
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