Photo by Sandra Strangemore
IN THE BAG
As Cousineau’s business continued to gather pace in the last couple of years and production volumes kept growing, he realized that time had arrived to invest into new, reliable packaging equipment to replace the company’s existing outdated bagging machinery.
“I needed something fast and reliable that could also perform product changeovers easily,” recalls Cousineau, who contacted Ken Manuel, a Toronto-based technical sales specialist with the Laval, Que-based packaging machine-builder Artypac Automation Inc., to come up with an automated, tailor-made packaging solution for his application needs.
After taking stock of Poppa Corn’s production requirements, Manual recommended Artypac’s model <stron
g>Arty 80V vertical form-fill-seal (V/F/F/S) machine, designed specifically for the type of pillow-pack packaging applications performed at the Mississauga plant.
Says Manuel: “The Arty 80V is very flexible, and it is one of the easiest machines to perform a changeover on—requiring no tools for adjustments, changeovers or cleaning.
“The addition of this new packaging system would enable Poppa Corn to automate the packaging of all the various popcorn seasonings they offer,” says Manuel, relating that Cousineau was quickly sold on the system’s potential productivity and other performance advantages over other competing systems, albeit at a cost of a little practical joke.
“On the day he bought the system he started the phone conversation by saying he decided to go with the competition,” chuckles Manuel, “but just as my jaw started to drop, he asked me how soon his new Artypac machine could be delivered.”
Installed this past January, the new Arty 80V machine—featuring a VECTROMOTION belt drive system—is a robust, high-performance, highly-automated bagging system capable of reaching throughput speed of 100 packages per minute when bagging items such as popcorn, coffee, spices, cereals, vegetables and assorted viscous products, always producing reliable leakproof seals to ensure optimal product integrity.
“The Arty 80V machine’s lever-operated film-sealing jaws work by the means of a pneumatic rotary cylinder,” explains Manuel, “and it also has a jaws-obstruction detection safeguard built into it to activate automatic release and instant machine-stop when required.
“It’s a very nice, fast and safe machine,” says Manuel, citing top-notch automation features that include an easily configurable SYSMAC CPM2A programmable logic controller (PLC) from Omron Electronics LLC; a model D700 Series inverter from Mitsubishi Electric; and high-precision pneumatic components supplied by Bimba Manufacturing Co.
Photo by Sandra Strangemore
Prior to the Arty 80V machine springing into action, the processed popcorn is mixed with a selected coating inside the mixer—supplied by Patterson Industries (Canada) Limited—and dumped into an Artypac model Tornado 600 auger-filler, which utilizes the VECTROMOTION technology to drive the filling screw, which can be easily adjusted by operators for optimal speed selection to match the product type and fill size.
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