Major Food Processing Plants

Food processing plant operates twenty-four-and seven with industrial automation. It produces eight wheat based products including Triscuits, Shreddies and Team. Nabisco built the plant 100 years ago and it is amazingly well preserved. However, the small interior spaces and the large concrete columns have made it difficult to rearrange processes and equipment.

Kraft worked with Dematic to overcome the obstacles and engineer a compact packing system that provides high throughput and safe product transport. The design criteria called for a system that would bring production line output together and provide an uninterrupted flow of cartons to the robotic unitizers. (They are called unitizers instead of palletizers because loads are built on slip sheets.) The system would then deliver the unitized loads to shipping.

Here’s how it works. After packing, product from the main production line as well as production lines from upper floors, is conveyed to a cartoning and sealing line. A pivoting gantry belt conveyor allows the vertical merging of one line to another. Inclined belt conveyors and a vertical lift take the cartons to upper level transportation, which feeds accumulation conveyor. Accumulation lines exit production through a wall opening and deliver product to induction conveyor belts. These belt units optimize carton gapping for efficient sortation. During induction, carton labels are scanned by a pair of laser scanners. The barcode includes information that determines which of the eight unitizers cartons will be sorted to. Product runs through induction to a merge and on to sortation.

For sortation, Dematic designers chose chain driven transfers with pusher bars. These transfers gently and squarely align cartons at the unitizer station in-feed line. The eight transfers are driven by AC servo motors that match unitizer speed and damp the transfer motion for secure handling.

The unitizer station orients and accumulates rows of cartons. Unitizer clamping arms take the rows and build loads on a belt conveyor. The load patterns are built, based on package size information derived from the bar code label. When a load is complete a traversing transfer car comes to the station, receives the load and delivers it onto a belt conveyor. The belt conveyor feeds the turntable of a shrink wrap machine. The wrapped load (which can weigh as much as 1400 pounds) is transferred onto heavy duty accumulation conveyor and delivered to shipping, where it is removed by a clamp truck. The clamp truck delivers loads to staging or shipping.

The system has met Kraft Foods expectations by handling the fragile cereals, safely and efficiently.