Leading pet food company looks to Cama to develop flexible packaging solution that easily adapts to market needs and consumer trends
A fast growing petfood manufacturer from UK has gained a reputation for high quality wet petfood that has allowed it to grow sales in global export markets. Following a recent investment in the process and filling side for pet food trays, the pressure was building to reduce costs and increase throughput on their packaging line. The problem was that its customer’s wanted standard single unit items and increasingly multi-pack, multi-flavour packaging; two very different packaging formats. It is existing equipment was slow and the process for the complete range of products required a lot of manual labour.
Flexible solution
The brief to Cama was to provide a solution that could deliver sleeved single trays in Display cases for single unit purchases and also the multi-pack variants, with up to four different flavours, in a consumer friendly take home box. This flexibility is further extended to cope with different tray and pot sizes ranging from 85g to 400g. Thanks to Cama’s decades of experience providing packaging machines and having an in-house packaging design team, Cama was able to propose a concept incorporating box forming and loading, sleeving, case packing, bundling and palletising to create a full, turn-key system. Working with their partners, Cama was able to integrate inkjet coding, print and apply labelling and bar code scanning to ensure the whole system met with the customers’ need to adhere to regulatory requirements for labelling and traceability of meat products.
Multi-format capabilities
The key to the flexibility of the line is Cama’s vision driven IG delta robot cell incorporating 4x Triaflex robots which take product arriving in four lanes and either load the infeed of the sleeving machine for single unit sales OR load directly into a take home box. All products are capable of running at 200 trays per minute. When running multi-flavour the infeed lanes are allocated to a specific flavour and the relevant box configuration is packed by the robots as the boxes travel through the IG loading unit.
We now have some amazing references in the CPG and HPC industries, including multi-variety product packaging applications. Flexibility is totally key, combined with shelf-ready cases and high line output. We can also easily address any Industry 4.0 and IIoT initiatives, as the control solutions we deploy offer seamless connection to plant-wide systems. And, to strengthen our design capabilities – and to make life easier for our customers – we are working on virtual commissioning and digital/virtual twins, too, alongside our own software and control applications that communicate with higher level control systems, while delivering robust cybersecurity
Industry 4.0 ready
Cama’s machines are seeing an incredibly positive reaction from many different markets, due to their flexibility, positive handling and high efficiency levels. Thanks to highly capable robotics and advanced automation solutions, they are Industry 4.0 ready and will comfortably fit into any smart-manufacturing environment.. And with a standardised solution, the end user will realise multiple benefits, not just those in terms of operational performance. The consumer boxes are formed on Cama’s FA21 forming unit, with the lids left open and pass to the loading for top loading by the robots before being closed, using hotmelt glue, on a versatile CD56 top flap closing machine. Smaller boxes are collated and shrink wrap bundled before palletising, large cases a fed directly to the palletiser. When running sleeved products, the four infeed lanes are all the same flavour and the robots load the trays directly on the flighted infeed conveyor for the high-speed Cama MP91 sleeving machine. A close coupled Cama FW748 wraparound case packer, receives the products at 200 trays per minute and packs into Shelf Ready (SRP) wraparound display cases. As a result of the investment, the customer is now able to pack more than three times as much product per day, utilising fewer people, and therefore reducing the reliance of temporary workers. The greater efficiency gained from the investment will allow Return on Investment (ROI) within 2 years.
