An automated line purpose-designed by PFM Packaging Machinery is wrapping and multi-packing cheese mini portions for Dairy Crest, at Frome. It allows production throughput to be raised while reducing the manual work previously involved.
Starting with a Scirocco flow-wrapper handling individual 20-40g cheese portions at up to 150/min, the line incorporates feed systems, conveyors, a support gantry and a 14-head PFM multi-head weigher. This runs in count-by-weight mode and delivers a preset number of portions, currently six, to an indexing elevator and into a net bagging, closing and labelling system.
In fully automatic mode the line handles one cheese variety at a time, but to allow selection packs to be created, PFM has equipped the elevator with an extended horizontal section to allow portions of different cheeses to be fed by hand.
The weigher and elevator can also be taken out of service, allowing the flow-wrapper to operate on conventional cheese wedge and block up to 125g.
