Cartoner runs stand up pouches

Advanced Nutritionals Corp. started in 1992 as a manufacturer of sport drinks. In 2001, the company changed its name to SoftPac Industries, Inc., and built a $12-million plant in Elk River, MN to produce juice drinks in standup pouches to compete with Kraft's Capri Sun 10-percent juice products. The plant was bought by contract-packing giant Faribault Foods in 2005, and with three high-speed lines running 300 pouches/min each, it is the largest private-label packager of 10-percent juice in standup pouches in the country. Its customers include top national retailers, including leading grocery chains, mass merchandisers and specialty outlets. As the company has continued to expand and grow, it has moved beyond 10-percent juice products into 100-percent juice and organic beverages. It also markets some pouches under its own brand name.

“We're built for speed and our base line is a 200-milliliter, standup, foil-laminated pouch,” says plant manager John Anderson. “We've designed this plant around the hot-fill product and and package. Within that package, customers have their choice of their own product formulation and customized pouch and carton graphics.”

Half the carton material

The company initially packaged its pouches in standard corrugated cartons, but by 2003 it needed to add capacity and it was also looking to optimize packaging materials. “We wanted a cartoner that could handle the output of two of our pouch fillers, about 600 pouches/min, at ninety-five percent efficiency or better, with one percent or less scrap,” says Anderson.

The company began talking to MeadWestvaco Corp. (www.meadwestvaco.com) about its new FlexiTECH™ technology, which includes a unique carton design as well as a high-speed cartoner to run the new carton. The FlexiTECH carton requires only about half of the material of a standard B-flute corrugated carton, because when the end flaps are folded, they form a supporting structure inside the carton that provides additional strength. Because of this, 6,000 FlexiTECH carton blanks fit on a pallet versus 4,800 standard blanks, so it cuts the pallet inventory for cartons by 20 percent for the same quantity of cartons.” Labor utilization is another benefit, says Anderson. “In addition to meeting our production and efficiency requirements, the FlexiTECH machine is very labor effective. It requires only two operators for 600 pouches/min, compared to three operators for our standard cartoner that produces 250 pouches/min.” Faribault leases the machine technology, and it was the first FlexiTECH machine in the U.S. when it was installed in early 2005.

“It turned out that the FlexiTECH cartons could be shorter on their front panels than our standard cartons,” says Anderson, “but it made the transition easier for our customers and stores if the front panel was the same, so we kept it the same. Where the dimensions really changed is in the side panels, which can be smaller. I can get 385 of these cartons on a pallet versus 320 of our standard cartons, the stacking pattern is more stable and the customer can get more boxes in the same shelf space.”

One problem that Faribault discovered with the new carton is that they can't do display pallets with it. The narrow cartons fall over when the shrink wrap is removed from the pallet load. “Some of our customers, use display pallets with three different flavors on a pallet,” says Anderson. “This is the biggest thing holding us back from converting everything to the FlexiTECH carton. The carton holds 10 pouches per box, and our primary requirement for MeadWestvaco was to design it to match our current face panels, so the store displays didn't change. From a customer standpoint, they also get more cartons on a shelf in the same amount of area, because the carton is narrower.”

The pouches at Faribault are produced on three form/fill/seal machines (PD will describe the packaging lines before and after the FlexiTECH cartoner in a subsequent issue).

Proper pouch spacing is critical

The MeadWestvaco cartoner requires very precise spacing of the pouches entering the machine. As part of the cartoning project, Faribault installed two automatic feeding machines from Intellifeed, Inc. (www.intellifeed.com) with a capacity of 300 pouches/min each that provide this spacing. Each of these machines is actually a dual unit with two identical systems rated at 150 pouches/min each.

Each system consists of a series of roller sections driven by computer-controlled stepper motors. The motors are triggered by sensors that detect the gaps between the pouches and adjust the speed of the individual roller sections to separate the pouch according to the required spacing. This computer program allows each section to communicate with all of the other sections to control the flow of the product along a roller array. The program also empowers the stepper motors to perform like servo motors as they speed up and slow down to push and pull the items away from each other. As the pouches proceed through the feeder, each is gradually spaced in relation to the pouch ahead of it, allowing an ordered stream of product to discharge from the machine.

Different products require different feeder designs. The units at Faribault have 114 individual rollers that are grouped into 19 six-roller sections.

Sixteen of these sections are driven by dedicated stepper motors that are controlled by dedicated sensors. One section has two sets of motors and rollers wired together with a sensor. The remaining two sections do not have a sensor and run at a constant speed.

Pouches are inspected

Each feeder discharges the pouches onto a conveyor that transports them to the FlexiTECH cartoner. On the way, pouches on both conveyors pass machines from Shrink Packaging Systems Corp. (www.shrinkpackaging.com) that apply straws from reels to the sides of the pouches using double-sided adhesive tape.

Next, the pouches travel beneath a proprietary inspection system that checks to see that every pouch has a straw attached, and that the pouches are not skewed on the conveyors. The pouches are then conveyed to the cartoner, where they drop into individual trays on the two parallel carrier systems. At this point, if sensors detect that a tray is missing a pouch, the system computer prevents one end of the appropriate carton from having glue applied and it will be pushed out of line. A worker will place a pouch in this carton and manually glue the end. The computer also uses data from these sensors to determine the rate at which pouches are entering the cartoner and regulate the speed of the continuous-motion cartoner accordingly.

Dual-headed robot

The trays are then released in groups of five to the individual carrier system (ICS). The ICS indexes the trays forward on a flexible conveyor to a pick-and-place system, where a dual-headed robot composed of five sets of 10 pickup heads, each equipped with vacuum cups, picks up 50 pouches at a time from the trays and moves them to five shuttles. If pouches are not available from one of the horizontal belts, the robot may pick from the other belt to fill demand. Five cartons, each containing 10 pouches, are assembled during each cycle. The FlexiTECH platform was a joint development of MeadWestvaco and Vortex Systems (www.ctpack.com/VS/), which is expert at handling flexible pouches.

Simultaneously, with the pouch handling, the cartoner picks up flat carton blanks with vacuum cups on a rotating arm and places them flat on a parallel conveyor. The cartons go through a 180-degree folding operation on each of the I-beam score lines, after which, the entire carton is rotated 90 degrees and indexed forward onto a metal carrier system. The carrier system transports, folds and reopens the carton to accept pouches. At this point, “bombay” doors in the bottoms of the shuttles containing the pouches open and gently drop the pouches onto the carton blanks.

In each carton, the pouches are placed in two parallel rows of five pouches each, all facing the same direction. In the next machine station, the two halves of the carton are folded together while retaining the pouches inside. To ensure that the pouches remain in alignment, a metal plate that Mead Westvaco calls a dynamic sword descends between the two sides of the carton as it is folded and holds the pouches in place. The interesting feature of this arrangement is that alternative pouches in the folded carton are upside-down so that the bottom of one pouch is against the top of the next pouch.

This nesting arrangement is what enables the FlexiTECH carton to be narrower than a standard carton, which allows more product to fit on the pallet and on the retail shelf. The cartons go through a series of hot gluing, compression and rotation stations, after which they discharge from the cartoner. The hot gluing operations utilize systems from Nordson Corp. (www.nordson.com).

The FlexiTECH is a modular, servo-driven machine. The control system uses a touchscreen panel to give operations and maintenance personnel quick, intuitive access to critical data. Other components include a PLC from SoftPLC Corp. (www.softplc.com) and Bosch Rexroth Corp. (www.boschrexroth-us.com) servo systems. MeadWestvaco's Intelligen® software captures torque data for every subassembly and compares this data to past performance and ideal specifications. From unbalanced assemblies and lubrication problems to bearings, belt and chain wear, the Intelligen software can remotely pinpoint the source of a possible failure without disrupting regular operation.

Outstanding support

“This was a beta machine for MeadWestvaco, and we went through some struggles to get it started,” says Anderson. “But, we had a whole army of people here from MeadWestvaco during the installation and shakedown, and I really take my hat off to them in terms of their support. Kenny Greggs, their chief technician for this project, was with us for the better part of a year as we went through the installation and training and debugging of this first-of-its-kind machine. Their support has been outstanding. It's how I always envisioned a partnership between two companies working. They did a phenomenal job. For example, the infeed was not long enough, so they made it longer. With things like that, you need to have someone standing behind you to make sure it will work.”