Heinrich Brüning is a snack food company located in Hamburg, Germany. The company is engaged in importing dry fruits and re-packing them in various quantities for supply to wholesalers and retailers.
One of the popular snacks of the company is Studentenfutter, which is targeted at students. The snack is a mixture of dry fruits such as raisins, cashews, parana nuts, almonds, walnuts and hazelnuts and is packed in 200g bags.
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The dry fruits used to be pre-mixed and then packed using multihead weighers designed to handle single products. The uneven properties of the ingredients made it expensive for Heinrich to ensure a right mix as it had to include more cashew and parana nuts in the mix to meet weight specifications. The company was incurring large product give-away.
Heinrich Brüning installed Ishida’s 24-head, CCW R-series weighers with six-mix configuration, in May 2011. The new weighers mix the ingredients and pack them, giving the product an even proportion.
The new equipment reduced the product give-away to 0.5%. In addition, the number of people employed in the pre-mixing process was reduced to half.
Benefits of using Ishida’s 24-head, CCW R-series weighers
The CCW-R series weigher has been customised and specifically designed for Heinrich Brüning’s Studentenfutter snack.
The machine was designed taking into account the properties of each dry fruit in the snack bag. The section handling nuts was made from polished stainless steel to resist the impact of hard nuts while the section handling raisins was corrugated and teflon-coated to avoid sticking.
In addition to addressing the issue of product give-away, the 24-head R-series also addressed the space constraints at the Hamburg factory. The factory has a limited floor space and head room of just 3.95m. The small footprint of the CCW-R weigher solved the issue of floor space while the headroom limitation was overcome by confining conveyors and feeding funnels to a floor above.
The pre-programmed settings allow the machine to modify the proportions of ingredients quickly.
Packaging process and speed
The new packaging line operates two shifts every day packing at a speed of 70 bags a minute.
The dry fruits are poured into different funnels on the segmented top of the weigher. Passing through the in-feed chute and dispersion feeder, the dry fruits fall into the pool hoppers. The pool hoppers drop the contents into weigh hoppers, from where the ingredients reach a discharge chute.
The combination of various ingredients in the discharge chute is determined by computer settings, to ensure the combination meets the total weight specifications.
The discharge chute drops the contents into the packaging machine.
Technology incorporated into the CCW R-series
The CCW-R-series is Ishida’s most technically advanced and high performance multihead weigher.
It comes in 16, 20 and 24-head models. The inbuilt rapid calculation system delivers high speed and accuracy in weighing product mix.
The dispersion and feeding process can be adjusted to get the desired speed and accuracy. This can be done in combination with the vibration, gravity, belts, centrifugal force and screw systems of the CCW-R multihead weigher.
An extra layer called the booster hopper can be added to the machine to store the already weighed product that has not been sent into the discharge chute, to manipulate the speed of the machine.
The control and monitoring system is built on the Windows XP platform. It allows to share and pre-set the data. It also comes with an optional help function and on screen manual and tutorials.
