STATE-OF-THE ART TECHNOLOGY FOR YOGURT AND FRUIT PUREE PACKING

The use of flexible packaging in general, and stand-up pouches in particular, is growing and increasing in popularity. Yogurt and fruit puree in single serve formats are exhibiting one of the biggest growths in the sector primarily due to spouted pouches making consumption “on the go” much easier. This type of packaging offers the consumer satisfaction and convenience, it can be transported easily and may be consumed anywhere and anytime. Hygiene and leak-proofing are guaranteed and the pouch may be opened and closed as many times as the consumer requires.

Supermarkets have adopted eye-catching, vividly coloured designs for their pouch products to attract consumers and achieve market growth using this packaging trend. The reduced size and weight of pouches allow transportation and storage easier and cheaper combined with the benefit of raw packaging material storage and transportation also being cheaper and less space consuming than say a rigid packaging format in the producer of the item.

Since 2010 Bossar Packaging has made significant investments in R+D to create the full-servo machine series – highly efficient machines that meet all the needs required by the market. The technical advantages of the full servo machines are many:

• Total independence of the different motion stations, processes and phases in the machine. The single shaft and fixed timings have come to an end.
• Immediate correction of timing, pressure and sealing for every speed, impossible to be done in a cam shaft machine.
• No more flaws in the cutting and sealing, producing perfectly centered pouches and sachets without peaks on their edges, which make them hard to differentiate from pre-made pouches.

The full servo HFFS machines are manufactured for clean and ultraclean applications, totally manufactured in stainless steel and provided with laminar flow cabinets to keep the filling area free of particles, mid-pressure UV light for film cleaning, and sanitizing of the spouts and caps with peroxide to achieve high levels of sanitization.

Whenever thermal treatment with or without high pressure processing, pasteurization or “retort” autoclaving is to be undertaken after the filling and sealing of the pouch, the sealing and safety offered by the manufacturer is fundamental. Thus it is necessary to install a sealing group controlled with numerical parameters to guarantee the safety of the spout and the pouch film.

The width correction group installed in the sealing group, is a system patented by Bossar that guarantees that the seals will have always the same width even in the case of an error occurring on the eye mark regardless of the centering of the printing area.

In the full servo machines there is an independent ultrasonic sealing system for both pouches formed by a single film or two different films.

Additional control mechanisms are provided, like optical guides to check that the pouches are correctly opened before filling the product, and vision cameras to control that the spout or valve was inserted in the correct position, so that the pouch is rejected before filling to avoid product wastage.

The space available and the setup of the machines at customer’s premises were taken into consideration in the design of the Bossar Motion Servo (BMS). Bossar machines can work either from the right or the left hand side. Working from the left hand side enables to set one machine opposite to the other, and a single person can operate both machines ergonomically, which translates into time and personnel savings.

When filling baby food, fruit puree and products that need the highest reduction of residual oxygen to prevent oxidation, it is necessary to provide the HFFS machine with a controlled atmosphere system with inert gas injection units (Nitrogen) in the auger filler, or the dosing tank. Gas is injected from the area where the pouches are opened before filling, to the top sealing.

With regards to the product customization, there are an infinite amount of pouch shape possibilities made with total or partial shape dies and special cutting knives. Not only an attractive and distinguishing visual impact is achieved by shaped pouches, but also the removal of any chards on the cut edges of the pouches that may damage other pouches or indeed the consumer.

The electrical consumption of the full servo machine is far lower than mechanical machines, enabling the feedback of any energy surplus, which is sent back to the grid through the power source.

Every mechanism in the full-servo machine works autonomously synchronized by the PLC and software. This feature allows when undertaking a controlled stoppage of production or when the product in the hopper is exhausted, the pouches in the walking beam in the filling area finish the top sealing process while the other parts in the machine stop their activity and movement, thus no waste of product or film occurs.

As no cams, shafts and springs exist in the full servo machine there is little or no potentially contaminating lubricants involved in the process. Taking all the above points into consideration we can confidently say that the BMS is a truly eco-friendly machine.