A family cheesemaker and dairy giant is reportedly benefiting from a ‘game-changing’ food safety inspection solution from Fortress Technology.
The system is combining metal detection and checkweighing into a twin-lane configuration, helping to optimise resources, reduce waste and maintain brand integrity.
The firm processes approximately 11 billion litres of dairy liquids annually and supplies fresh products to over 60 countries. Tasting, approving and signing every cheese batch to accompany internal quality controls, several of the company’s processing plants now deploy the latest inspection and checkweighing technology from Fortress.
Being premium products, Fortress explained the ability to isolate each contamination event and reduce good product wastage was an attractive feature. Currently, five customised twin-lane Raptor ‘Combination’ systems are located between the upstream packaging area and the secondary case loading section in two of the company’s cheese processing plants. The design has solved the challenge of inspecting cheese products tightly spaced together.
Receiving sliced, blocked, shredded and soft cheeses directly from the upstream dual-head bagger and flow wrapping packaging machines, the integrated Fortress system starts with a compact curving conveyor. Designed to ensure optimal spacing between lanes, the conveyor helps avoid congestion by spacing product lanes out evenly as they are fed into the individual, lane-specific metal detector aperture and checkweighing belt.
“One of the greatest challenges when checkweighing in fast-paced packing lines is making sure there is sufficient pitch from one pack to the next so that only one pack is present on the weigh conveyor at a time,” said Fortress Technology Europe’s checkweighing specialist Dan Shail. “This will ensure that packages are not rejected as unstable weight readings.”
The metal detector and checkweigher conveyor decks and belts are designed to be easily removed from the machine for rapid deep sanitation and maintenance.
The inspection machine consolidates a single metal detector divided into two compact apertures, plus two independent weight verification checkweighers. Each technology and lane have individual air blast reject mechanisms to isolate metal contaminants and weight rejects.
As each lane, metal detector aperture, checkweigher and reject is programmed to run independently, interruptions are said to be minimised during product switchovers or maintenance. It is also possible to run two different product lines, pack sizes or SKUs simultaneously on the adjacent conveyors.
Dan Shail added, “Reducing aperture size is one of the most effective ways to increase metal detector sensitivity. The reason for this is sensitivity is measured at the geometric centre of the aperture. Making the ratio of the aperture to the size of the product an essential consideration.”
After inspecting packs for metal contaminants, good cheese packs – at 140 ppm per line – are fed into the Raptor digital checkweighing system. To comply with global weights and measures regulations, in just milliseconds the in-motion, three-belt checkweigher weighs, analyses, captures and reports data simultaneously.
Replicating the reject motion of the metal detectors, air nozzles blast out-of-tolerance products off the line into lockable bins. Software adds full transparency, with Fortress revealing that an average weight mode makes instant reject decisions and combines the batch statistical data from across both lanes.
Products that pass both inspection tests move onto a merging conveyor, aligning and presenting the packs to an automated downstream case packing system.
Both the metal detector and checkweigher capture live OEE data.
“By gathering live production information from each lane independently, a fast-paced food facility can establish the operational parameters and extract statistics that are most valuable to them,” Dan stated. Analysed data can include volume, weight, inspection rates, rejects and downtime.
The combi system features data logging and can be connected to Fortress Technology’s Contact 4.0 software. Reports can be exported as either PDF or Excel files covering a specific production line and/or time period.
“Rather than monitoring machine performance manually, this level of cohesive reporting on a dual-lane system provides valuable OEE data to help boost operational efficiencies,” Dan concluded.
