Paramount Packaging has installed two additional Fuji Alpha VII box motion flow-wrapping systems at The Village Bakery’s production facility in Wales.
The purpose-built horizontal form-fill-seal lines, which feature extra-long infeeds for use with robot handling technology, are being used for the high speed wrapping of pancakes and blinis. The decision by the Welsh bakery company to install the two new systems was designed to increase efficiencies, reduce labour costs and ensure a faster product changeover.
The Village Bakery, which has a factory in Wrexham, specialises in freshly made bread, rolls and other baked products.
The company’s director, Christien Jones, said: “We are a long-standing user of Fuji flow-wrappers with five systems already installed across all four production facilities for general bakery products and crumpets. We’ve even visited Fuji’s plant in Japan. When we needed to replace older-style machines with bespoke units to cope with an increase in capacity and the introduction of robot handling technology, it made sense to choose Paramount Packaging and Fuji form-fill-seal models again.
“The first wrapper installed was fully operational 40 minutes after being unloaded and ran for a complete shift with no issues. This and the subsequent Fuji flow-wrappers have proved ideal for our manufacturing process, which encompasses multiple product lines, short runs and constant changeovers. The machines are easy to use with quick product changeover, reliable, and consistently perform.”
The two Fuji flow-wrappers have been customised to accept robot-placed stacks of various sizes of pancakes and blinis and wrap the products with or without flat base or U cards. The system ensures maximum throughput efficiencies with minimum labour requirements, Paramount said.
“The new flow-wrapping lines have helped increase the efficiency of our handling and packaging process with quicker and more accurate product changeover,” Jones continued. “They have also improved the overall pack quality, which has helped reduce product damage and waste.”
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