PACKAGING TECHNOLOGY Gently does it!
Daniel Bossel, Global Product Manager at Syntegon discusses what to look out for to ensure your delicate baked goods don’t get damaged or broken in the packing hall.
Consumers want their biscuits crumbly, their cookies soft and their crackers crispy, which can pose problems for bakeries. As soon as baked goods leave the oven, they are in danger of damage from mechanical stress. Bumping together or against safety guarding can affect their overall structure, decreasing production efficiency and resulting in product waste. This is why many bakeries need to make the gentle handling of their baked products a priority. After baking and cooling the next step for baked goods is usually a discharge station, which distributes products to various packaging legs via conveyor systems – preferably without breakage. Syntegon can offer solutions for gentle and efficient discharging with a modular discharge slide system that consists of one or more stations that can be arranged one behind the other. Each is equipped with belt slides and runs entirely without format parts. Fragile baked goods slide smoothly over its belts and are never dropped or pushed. This format- free design helps to minimise mechanical stress and avoid product loss. On the individual legs, an additional belt slide arranges the straight product stream into an S-shape to ensure that cookies and crackers are evenly distributed across the entire width of the belt, preventing them from collision and breakage.
When baked goods are ready for primary and
secondary packaging, pick-and-place solutions can be a good way to place sensitive products from the transportation belt into primary or secondary packaging machines – onto the infeed belt of flow wrappers or cartoners, for example. Systems that can help minimise product loss typically share three key features. Firstly, they have linear motors that can move pickers smoothly and with minimal vacuum application; they have end- of-arm tools that can be easily adapted to the shape and texture of the product; and finally, they include camera-based vision systems to recognise the shape and position of each cookie, biscuit, or cracker and transmit this information to the picker control system to ensure a perfect grip, every time. It is important that gentle handling does not decrease efficiency and output, so equipment should offer flexibility at the same time. For example, conveyor systems that can automatically increase their discharge capacity or regulate product distribution onto individual legs, can be helpful. One of the most effective ways to increase efficiency, however, is to minimise downtime during format changes, and this is where pick-and-place solutions can really shine today as modern systems have an adaptable number of vacuum pickers – some as many as 40 – that can be put into action quickly and easily if output increases.
“Without a buffer system, any issues with packaging machines or other surrounding production-line equipment might bring production lines to a halt, resulting in costly product waste”
and boost efficiency in bakery packaging operations,” says Massimo Pietra, Sales and Marketing Group Director at Cavanna. “The interaction between product, packaging machinery and line efficiency is key.” Focusing on packaging line layout, Massimo believes
it is important to decouple the packaging operation from the production line to ensure that packaging is never a bottleneck. “It is also important that a packaging line includes some built-in redundancy in order to absorb production fluctuations, cope with unplanned stoppages. It is also important that the packing line has the capability to deplete the buffer.”
42 Kennedy’s Bakery Production April/May 2023
Massimo wants to dispel the myth that buffer storage systems are simply costly and space-hungry systems. “Buffer systems enable flow equalisation and first-in-first- out (FIFO) running mode of the packing line. Their capacity, however, does need to be carefully evaluated in relation to the machinery they will need to cope with.” There are many different buffering solutions available, so it is important to find the right solution for the packaging line – which can add value to the line and not simply cover weaknesses. In one application, for a Latin-American food manufacturer, Cavanna supplied a buffer solution for a new cookie line. At the outfeed of the oven, the cookies run through a trombone
bakeryproduction.co.uk
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