With a goal of bringing good health and food together with a tasty range of products tackling consumer health challenges, Bicentury Group solved a delicate problem at its Quart, Spain, plant with an innovative packaging system.

Its Bifidus line of low-fat and low-sugar biscuits is a natural candidate for small-count, stacked-biscuit sales, which are said to be growing in Europe about three times faster than the general biscuit market. This reflects consumer desires for readily available, very fresh product sold in small, single portions and as multipacks.

The low-pressure feeder removes product from the bottom of the channels, with biscuits pushed upward with little pressure.

To package its relatively fragile Bifidus biscuit, which requires careful handling, Bicentury chose Sigpack Systems (www.sigpacksystems.com) HCM (horizontal compact machine) platform. The horizontal form/fill/seal machine is configured to operate at medium speed within a main-frame construction using a modular design whose advantages include compactness, fast changeover and economical functioning.

Incorporated into the machine is a new servo-driven feeding module that replaces the common feeding chain to shorten the infeed section by more than 5 ft. The machine also offers programmable servo control to enable fast changeovers and product flexibility. With this platform, the elements pack stacks of four, five or six biscuits into a flowrap from the start of the line, where 20 rows of biscuits reportedly are belt-transported to three operators who manually feed them into vibratory channels.

These channels, which optimally adjust speed, minimize pressure while assuring a continuous flow to the feeder, which removes the fragile biscuits by pushing upward with minimal pressure but at full line speed to complete the stack using three channels.