Kagome USA Form-Fill-Seals the Deal with SEE™ Precision Yield Optimization
By Kagome USA
ABOUT KAGOME USA
As a global leader in sauce creation and production, the Kagome team works closely with customers to provide flavourful solutions to meet the demands and trends of food-service and food-processing operations around the world. As a global, vertically integrated supplier of fruit and vegetable products, such as sauces, drinks, and ready-to-eat meals, Kagome is passionately devoted to the crops, customers, and communities they serve.
CHALLENGE
Located in the rich tomato country of Los Banos, California, Kagome develops customized sauces, soups, and spreads for global restaurant brands. By utilizing vertical form-fill-seal (VFFS) equipment with CRYOVAC® brand flexible packaging, Kagome can offer a wide range of pouch sizes to their customers. Like many other food processors, Kagome was challenged with managing the natural process variations that come with producing and packaging their quality products. In order to enhance consistency in package weights and reduce future rework, Kagome slightly increased the target fill to ensure they always met their customer package weights. This meant they were ultimately giving away product at times.
SOLUTION
Realizing the opportunity to improve its operations and uncover yield benefits, Kagome tapped into longtime partner Sealed Air. Together, our teams worked through a development partnership to implement SEE™ Precision Yield Optimization. This digitally driven solution is designed to automatically adjust key parameters to compensate for natural process variations that can occur in aspects like film, product, heat, and viscosity. Equipped with a specialized dashboard, SEE™ Precision Yield Optimization helped the Kagome operations team turn raw data into meaningful and digestible information, resulting in improved visibility to the performance of their operations.
RESULT
As a result, Kagome tightened performance around its target set weight to achieve more accurate fill weights. SEE™ Precision Yield Optimization improved efficiencies across all liquid food packaging lines by reducing the number of high and low weight kickouts while maintaining steady weight control throughout their runs. The collective effort resulted in a reduction of product giveaway by an average of 0.5 ounces per package, a lost revenue savings equivalent to$200,000. In addition to cost savings, preventing lost product, and unnecessary rework, SEE™ Precision Yield Optimization provided the innovation and technology that the company is looking for in a long-term solution.
PULLQUOTE
“We were able to see a very significant change in a short time. We’re seeing more steady weight control throughout our runs, and it (SEE™ Precision Yield Optimization) gives us a tremendous advantage inconsistency of our weights and reduction of our loss.” – Jeremy Ruiz, Operations Manager Kagome USA
SEE™ Precision Yield Optimization offers complimentary use of Sealed Air’s proprietary connectivity solution, SEE™ Smart Link, an innovative technology that allows you to collect, store, analyze, share operating data. Digitally connected to a Mettler Toledo industrial scale, where real-time, precise package weight data is sent to your CRYOVAC® brand 3002 vertical form-fill-seal equipment for determination of any needed machine adjustments. SEE™ Precision Yield Optimization is optimized to work with SEE™ Advanced Maintenance Program (AMP), a proactive, preventive maintenance plan designed to increase uptime, enhance performance, and improve efficiency for select equipment models in the SEE™ Automation portfolio.
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