Frozen Assets

Wing Xian’s family has been producing traditional Asian foods for families for more than 20 years. Her family started up their own food manufacturing business in China more than 15 years ago, and in 2018, Xian decided to branch out by immigrating to Canada and building her own company, SIHE International Group, in Markham, Ont. In only five years, the company has grown exponentially.

“Our whole facility is over 50,000 square feet. We have more than 30 staff here working,” says Xian, who is the owner and operations director for SIHE International Group.

The company started out with a provincial license in 2018, following it up with a national distribution licence in 2020 and an export license in 2021—allowing it to sell its product into the U.S. market after achieving both SQF (Safe Quality Food) and HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points) certifications.

The main products produced and pre-packaged at the facility incorporate different varieties of meat that include chicken, beef, pork, lamb and seafood.

The company produces frozen meals like soups, noodles, rice dinners, marinated cooked meats, and other authentic Asian products under the its flagship Chef Shuo brand.

The Chef Shuo brand offers a wide variety of products with more than 40 SKUs (stock-keeping units) available to choose from.

“We sold all our products to Asian supermarkets at the beginning,” Xian relates, “but later, we expanded to the big stores like No Frills, Loblaws, Sobeys and Walmart.”

Retail orders currently comprise approximately 60 per cent of the company’s business, according to Xian, while wholesale makes up the remaining 40 per cent.

As Xian explains, fulfilling larger and larger orders from some of the biggest grocery chains across the country requires a significant amount of manual labour, as well as automated processing and packaging technologies.

While the processing side of her business has been largely automated for some time, the company had been experiencing some bottlenecks in production on the packaging side.

Fortunately for Xian, she was already familiar with an automated solution—the MULTIVAC R105 thermoforming packaging machine—that seemed like a perfect fit for her operation.

“Another customer of ours had a MULTIVAC R105 thermoforming packaging machine that Wing at SIHE International Group had a positive experience with,” explains Phil Crozier, National Sales Manager at MULTIVAC Canada in Brampton, Ont.

“She wanted the reliability and high pack quality, for which our equipment is known worldwide, for her own products when her business entered its next phase of growth,” Crozier says.

After a MULTIVAC sales representative had reached out to Xian and provided her with the company’s catalogue of packaging solutions, she had the opportunity to review them thoroughly before expressing interest in a thermoforming packaging machine.

When Xian did reach out, she was impressed with the company’s quick response.

“When we first went to MULTIVAC to look at different equipment, we got to use our own products there onsite—to see exactly what equipment was the best fit for us,” Xian recalls.

“We then found the one machine that we felt could best solve our packaging issues,” she says.

After testing out the different types of equipment, Xian’s company opted for the aforementioned MULTIVAC R105 thermoforming packaging machine, which offered numerous advantages over the existing manual packaging process.

As Xian relates, the plant’s previous packaging process involved using pre-made pouches and swing-lid vacuum chamber machines.

While this type of equipment is versatile and provided an ideal entry platform for vacuum packaging, Crozier says the R105 thermoformer offers vastly superior ease-of-loading, reduced likelihood of seal contamination, and a much more attractive pack presentation.

As Crozier explains, vacuum chamber packaging machines utilize a three-step process, starting with loading the products into the pouch via the pouch neck.

In the second step, these filled pouches are then placed into the vacuum chamber machine for oxygen evacuation and sealing. The third step requires the operator to unload the evacuated, sealed packages from the machine before the next batch of filled pouches can be placed inside.

Says Crozier: “During the first step it is possible for the product to come into contact with the inside of the pouch seal area, allowing for sauce or herbs, for example, to be transferred—creating the potential for a leaking pack.

“It is a time-consuming process that can lead to rework if the operators are not careful when loading the pouches,” he points out.

“With a thermoforming packaging machine, it is a single-stage automatic process: the operator simply places the products into the larger aperture of the formed, open pack in the machine loading area, where the product does not come into contact with the seal area at all,” Crozier relates.

“The machine automatically advances the filled packs into the sealing die, where evacuation and sealing take place, and then through the cutting system to create individual packs.

“After this, the formed, filled and sealed vacuum packs automatically exit the machine for transfer onto the next stage of the customer’s production line,” he says.

In addition to preventing potential leaks or rework, the R105 thermoforming packaging machine also significantly increased the company’s overall output.

“Before I could do 2,000 packs per shift,” Xian says, “whereas now I can do 20,000 packs.

“It’s helping me to grow my business,” Xian says, citing various performance attributes and competitive advantages provided by the model R105 thermoformer.

“The MULTIVAC R105 is a really good piece of equipment,” she states. “It’s fast and it works really well.

“The size of the equipment is really good,” she says, “and it is very durable.

“The throughput capacity is also very good,” Xian adds.

According to MULTIVAC, one of key advantages offered by the R105 thermoforming packaging machine is the configurable machine lengths and format dies.

Offering formable film surfaces in sizes ranging from 150 mm to 360 mm in length, 266 mm to 401 mm in width, and 10 mm to 95 mm in depth, the R105 system offers numerous benefits, including:

• High production output and pack quality;
• Robust and durable stainless-steel construction;
• Patented MULTIVAC Hygienic Design for maximum hygiene and convenient cleaning;
• Safe and ergonomic operation; and an IPC control with HMI 2.0 graphic user interface.

“The HMI (human-machine interface) is very easy to use,” Xian says, singling out the machine’s multilingual communication capabilities as particularly helpful feature for her operation.

“Our technicians and controllers all speak Chinese,” she says, “so we switched the program to Chinese so that they can easily understand what all the different instructions mean.

“The program is set up really well,” she adds. “I can pre-set programs for our different products, and there is plenty of memory capacity in the equipment to enable us to store hundreds of recipes.

“I have run it for 10-to-12 hours a shift without stopping,” she extols.

Notably, the R105 thermoforming packaging machine’s forming and sealing dies can be equipped with drawer systems that enable the die bottom section to be pulled out from the side of the machine—offering superior ergonomics and easy access.

According to MULTIVAC, the machine’s drawer systems enable time savings of more than 60 per cent per format changeover.

“The machine is equipped with two dies,” says Crozier, “so it allows for a greater range of products to be packed with a minimal amount of packaging material.”

For her part, Xian says she enjoys the fact that MULTIVAC Canada’s headquarters is located in fairly close proximity to her own production facility.

“They are close to us with an office in Brampton,” she says, “so I can go there and see their equipment any time.

“It’s very convenient for us.

“They also have very good customer service as well,” she adds. “Whenever I have a problem, there’s a number I can call, and they will talk to us or FaceTime us to try to fix the issue.

“They also have a local technical support team,” she adds, “so if I have an issue, they can have someone come over and have it fixed in one day.”

By investing in the R105 thermoforming packaging machine, SIHE International Group has also invested in a more sustainable operation, according to Xian, since the reduction in repacking also means less packaging materials being wasted.

“We try to use less of materials for our bags and bowls, and we try to use more sustainable materials like recyclable packaging,” Xian says. “The automated process definitely generates less waste than manual processes.”

With orders of the Chef Shuo brand on the rise at major grocery retail chains across Canada and the U.S., the company expects to take full advantage of its 50,000 square feet of available production space in the future.

“Right now, my company is using half of our capacity, half of our production area,” she says. “In two to three years, we want to use the full capacity, producing two to three times more products.

“We’ll need more equipment to do that, especially on the packaging lines, to facilitate that expansion,” Xian notes.

“We’ll also probably need multiple kinds of packaging products and systems—vacuum packs, bowl packaging lines, and other different kinds of packaging technologies.

“We don’t have anything specific in mind right now,” Xian concludes, “but when we establish some new products that meet market needs, we will definitely need some more high-quality packaging equipment to increase production.”