Renfro dishes up induction sealing

Renfro Foods is a family-operated business that began in 1940. Today, its zesty products include a variety of 26 salsas, sauces and relishes, available in supermarkets, gourmet and gift shops and fruit and vegetable stands in the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Mexico and the U.K. Renfro Foods also contract-packages a variety of sauces and relishes for foodservice accounts, including restaurants and other entities.

Named Vendor of the Year in 2005 by Wingstop Restaurants Inc., Fort Worth, TX-based Renfro Foods supplies Wingstop's private-labeled sauces in plastic gallon-sized containers with wide-mouth, 110-mm caps and in F-style handled jugs with 63-mm caps, Both packages are induction-sealed. Over the last decade, Renfro Foods has experienced a great boost in production volume for this portion of its business and had to make some additions to its sealing operation.

The company first invested in induction-cap sealing in 1995, when it purchased a Compak Jr. ™ portable tabletop machine from Enercon Industries (www.enercondind.com) to seal salsa containers it copacks in slant-handled jugs with 63-mm caps.

Renfro Foods evaluated several equipment brands at the time and identified Enercon as a market leader, says company president Doug Renfro. With help from Enercon's local equipment distributor representative R.P. Anderson Co. (www.rpanderson.com), which offered a great deal of local expertise, Renfro Foods was able to conduct sealing demonstrations with the Compak Jr., which “sealed the deal.” Weighing only 14 lb, the self-contained sealer proved to be a powerhouse. Soon, it was pulled into service sealing entire truckloads of Renfro Food's containers.

The sealer requires no water or special power, so can be used just about anywhere in a plant location.

Renfro Foods started heat-induction-sealing its containers for a couple of reasons, Doug Renfro says. “Many of our foodservice customers began to refuse accepting glass containers and the freight/shipping costs are lower on plastic because it's lighter. Our finished product in a plastic container averages about thirty-eight pounds gross per case, versus forty-eight pounds in glass.”

At first, the company put the Compak Jr. induction sealer into service as a standalone machine for short production runs to provide tamper-evidence and to seal in product freshness. Over the next several years, foodservice product demand grew and the production runs became longer and longer.

Says Doug Renfro, “We used the machine for all of our volume on foodservice, which had reached regular, truckload-sized orders. We laughed when we saw Enercon's description of the Compak Jr.It was designed for laboratory use and short production runs. But we can attest, it's a production workhorse. We started sealing truckloads of containers with it.”

Induction sealing became such an integral part of the foodservice packaging business that the company invested in a second Compak Jr. in 2004, as a backup to the primary machine.

A specially engineered sealing coil allows the unit to induction-seal closures in various sizes up to 110 mm. To use it, an operator sets the power mode to high or low, sets a timer, places the sealing coil over the closure on a filled container and presses a trigger on the handle of the coil. The timer ticks off the required number of seconds to ensure a strong a secure seal as power is applied into the cap to form the seal. The innerseal from the closure heats and releases, fusing onto the mouth of the container for a snug fit.

While the Compak Jr. machines kept up with the faster pace, at the time, Wingstop, one of Renfro Foods' primary foodservice customers, was expanding its product distribution into 25 states.

Renfro Foods saw that a fully automated induction sealer was needed on that bottling line to minimize some of the labor-intensive tasks.

But as Doug Renfro says, the 65-yr-old company soon became rather shoehorned into its production floor plan. “Space is always an issue in our plant,” he tells PD. But after discussing with this with Enercon and with R.P. Anderson, he decided that Enercon's automated system, the Super Seal, would best meet the line's needs. “It would also allow us to anticipate any additional growth expectations we could have for next several years.”

Renfro Foods added the fully automatic Super Seal—its third induction-cap sealer—within the past year. The unit was integrated into reconfigured to run both foodservice and retail products.

An air-cooled system, the Super Seal operates via a dedicated microprocessor and a controller. With an all-in-one, quick-change sealing head that pivots to allow for sealing bottles and jars with different closure diameters, it features a waterless design and an adjustable “Loss of Seal” indicator that allows users to preset the power level and trigger an indicator such as a stack light, if the supplier power dips below the preset level. Control sets the machine into local/remote and auto/manual modes. The Super Seal also provides adjustable support for easy setup to a variety of container heights.

“With the Compak Jr., we could seal five units or gallons per minute,” adds Doug Renfro. “The Super Seal can seal nine containers per minute. That really improved our line speeds and combined with the labor savings we see from automated sealing—it's great.”

Doug Renfro says the company is quite pleased with both the Super Seal machine and the fact that it's fully automatic. The Compak Jr. machines are currently used as backups. “Today we use them to seal bottles of our barbecue sauce, a dozen different salsas and several relishes,” he tells PD.

The plant has also expanded to include two production lines—one for retail items that fills jars and bottles in sizes from 11.5 to 32 oz and the “workhorse line” that runs the multilayer plastic foodservice containers that are induction-sealed. Both packaging lines merge through the same cooler and then split up again for labeling and palletizing sequences.

On the foodservice line, which usually runs containers from 1 to 5 gal, filling is performed on a single-head Ideal Mfg. & Sales (www.idealmfg.com) system before the closures are applied by hand. The bulk-sized, multilayer polypropylene/ethylene vinyl alcohol/high-density polyethylene containers with 63-mm finishes are provided by Alcan Packaging (www.alcanpackaging.com). These are capped with closures from Mold-Rite Plastics (www.moldriteplastics.com) that feature Safe-Gard 102 two-piece pulpboard/foil innerseals from Unipac Corp., an ITW co. (www.unipac.ca). The polypropylene jugs with the 110-mm finishes are molded by Thomas Plastics and acquired though Ryco Packaging Corp (www.ryco.com). Rexam Delta Plastics (www.rexam.com) furnishes the caps and innerseals.

The filled containers are next placed on a conveyor that leads them beneath the Super Seal induction sealer, which releases the closure liner from the cap and fuses it onto the rim of the container at speeds of about 116 ft/min. Next, with closures and innerseals in place, the containers head into a cooling tunnel from I&H [now from Arrowhead Systems (www. www.arrowheadsystems.com)] that cools them down to a temperature of about 75 deg F. Two mats and a divider keep containers from the retail and foodservice packaging lines apart but cooled concurrently in the tunnel. As the containers emerge from the cooling tunnel, the lines split up for labeling, case-packing and palletizing sequences. The foodservice containers are labeled by hand, loaded into shipping cases and palletized by hand.

When asked if the company has experienced a return on its induction-sealing equipment investment, Doug Renfro replies, “Here we're pretty informal. We don't calculate ROIs. The Super Seal saved us a significant amount in labor costs, so we're happy. Should the foodservice business expand much further, perhaps we will add another shift. The sealers can take it.”

The company can now concentrate on watching the condiment/sauce trends in upscale restaurants, knowing that within a short time, the trendy flavors there will make their way into consumer households across the country. Next on its product-development menu? Mango Habanera Salsa.