Page 9 - Machines Italia Vol. XIII Next Generation Manufacturing

“My technical team sees a lot of benefit in having this,” Pirkle said. “Especially with the alarms, because with any piece of machinery you’re going to have a lot of sensors and limit switches and things like that. And whenever a machine goes down or you have a problem that you’re trying to track, it can be an electrician’s nightmare. So they’ve addressed those things on both the electrical and the mechanical side, making it easier for the operators and the companies to use—which at the end of the day should make you more productive.”
Custom design up front, 24/7 support thereafter
Wasatch Product Development, LLC (West Valley City, Utah, USA, https://wasatchlabs.com/) is a contract manufacturer special- izing in food or puree based products. They “focus on flexible pack- aging in two formats, tear top and spouted pouches,” said Bryan Wright, divisional chief operating officer. As Wright explained, tear tops are commonly used for energy gels, while “spouted pouches really took over the applesauce and baby food space about seven to eight years ago.” Ensuring food safety requires pasteurization, so they heat it to between 185° and 205°F before putting it in the pouch. “But the problem is, once you fill that pouch, you need to extract the heat quickly. For about 30 seconds the heat is there to serve a purpose—to kill anything that might be on the film or inside the pouch. After that, heat becomes a detriment. It breaks down the taste, color, and nutritional supplements.”
To solve this problem, Wright turned to SARP Food Technolo- gies (Castelfranco Veneto, Italy, www.sarp.it/en/), a member of AS- SOFOODTEC—Italian Association of Machinery and Plant Manu- facturers for Food Production, Processing, Preservation (https:// www.anima.it/associazioni/elenco/assofoodtec/). SARP makes a variety of food processing equipment, to include an air cooling tech- nique, and Wright said Wasatch is the only company in the US taking advantage of it. “Most systems use water, which is a better conduc- tor,” he explained. “However, water also is a great environment for bacteria and other things to grow and to contaminate products. So we use air for that purpose and we’re unique.”
He explained that once the pouch comes out of the SARP system it’s at a temperature of between 70 and 80oF. “At that point, we’ve preserved the product in a unique way that is very difficult for our competition to match.” Wasatch also uses SARP technology to orga- nize the pouches coming off the line in a systematic way. Their pro- duction is too variable to automate the packaging, but the cadence and sorting of the output is important. “I need it to be organized so that when my people pack it out, we’re doing it in the most cost ef- fective way possible,” said Wright.
While SARP has an extensive line of products, Wright said it’s more appropriate to think of it “as an engineering firm that can design and customize solutions. That’s what I like about SARP. They assess what we’re trying to do and whether or not we need flexibility in the type of products we’re going to run. Or if in some instances we are going to run the same product consistently, they’ll design it differently.”
Wright said SARP supports them through all phases of a project, from designing the line with input from Wasatch, to installation, “a tre- mendous amount of hands-on training,” operational qualification, and on-line 24-7 support thereafter. “We built this plant from nothing,” con- tinued Wright. “So training was a very important factor in determining who we were going to work with. There were US based suppliers that were, candidly, a little less expensive. But what I liked about SARP was, first, they engineered well and then they trained well. And their training process is not just in person. They support us at all hours of the day be- cause we operate at all hours of the day. They’re very good about that.”
A rendering of the SARP cooling spirals at Wasatch Product Development - They quickly and safely lower the temperature of the food to preserve taste and nutrition.
He also noted that SARP also has connections into Wasatch equipment. “In some instances, they’ll take control of the machine and make some adjustments to the code, which is not something we can risk doing ourselves,” Wright said.
Having said that, Wright underlined that with the excellent training they’ve gotten and proper maintenance, they’ve had very few emer- gencies that required immediate attention.
Peace of mind through remote monitoring
When a process has a long cycle time, standing around hoping things go well is not attractive. So Jim Brebner, co-owner of CIMA Color Solutions (Phoenix, USA, https://cimacolors.com/) loves the remote monitoring function on their NRG/HT-DL rotary dyeing ma- chine. Years ago, Brebner developed a patented approach that makes stained tablecloths and napkins look new again at roughly half the cost of new. The process required specialized technology no US manufac- turer wanted to touch, so he partnered with ACIMT member Flainox Srl (Quaregna Cerreto, Italy, www.flainox.com). Now his firm resur- rects over half a million pounds of table linens every year.
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