cucumbers becoming pickles

I recently visited a commercial kitchen which is part of a Community Development Corporation – a non-profit designed to encourage development in the community or region it serves. In this case the commercial kitchen is designed to help fledgling food businesses get off the ground by providing them business support in developing their food product to scale production, creating a business plan that works and getting necessary certifications. Once approved a fledgling food entrepreneur can rent production space including equipment by the hour, and use dry, refrigerated or freezer storage by the week. This space is also available to local non-profits such as Meals on Wheels, a meal delivery service for the elderly.

If you are thinking about getting started and don’t have a commercial kitchen near you, you could consider using a restaurant kitchen in its off hours.

Here are things to consider courtesy of the Franklin County CDC:

• Business Plan: get your ideas and goals in one document. Define your products, market and competitors. How much money will you need?
• Product Development: small batch testing. then lab analysis leads to scale up and testing and onto packaging and labeling
• Regulations: State licensing is required to sell wholesale and local licensing for retail. Meat and poultry require USDA approval. The FDA cares about products requiring acidification. The Bioterrorism Act requires FDA registration for all domestic food producers. Plus you need liability insurance.

We talked a lot about what kind of packaging works for different products and where the highest returns are in selling food products and how packaging supports that value perception. We also discussed what packaging can the kitchen justify buying as opposed to the brand owner.

As a food entrepreneur, you may be able to use a commercial or restaurant kitchen to create your product, but you may need to purchase your own packaging machinery, if you want to be able differentiate your product.

For more information about becoming a food entrepreneur, visit The Foodpreneur. For information about entry level overwrapping machinery for boxes or bundles look here, and for wrapping individual food items look here.

Our role is to provide advice on packaging and to give readers the opportunity to think about their packaging. Our latest post focuses on package design and provides guidelines for strategically thinking about your packaging before you commit.

The FoodPreneur creates successful new product launches for food entrepreneurs and all aspects of getting out of the kitchen, getting on the shelf and getting on the consumers plate. At Package Machinery, we are pleased to support Dom and his readers.

We hope that our machinery offerings will serve food entrepreneurs as well as his advice does. Check them out.

Time is money.

Whether it is the customer with fifteen SKUs to overwrap, the one with five wrap sizes or the one that wants to wrap double stacks of some SKUs but not others, changeover on overwrapping equipment can be time consuming. Servo controls shorten the time by allowing for recipe storage and digital setting of parameters.This feature sets a servo overwrapper apart from a mechanical overwrapper.  Some FA-ST overwrapper users achieve a product changeover in less than 10 minutes.

Does a plant manager measure changeover as downtime, production costs, or just lost time? No matter how you look at it, it is time and money that cannot be retrieved, so minimizing it is important.

There are overwrapping machines that take many hours to changeover and some that take minutes. For Package Machinery servo overwrappers, the time to changeover is minimal, even for a three dimensional changeover.

Much of the changeover is done by using recipes stored in the memory of the machine HMI control. Those recipes can be accessed from the screen shortening the time to make changes and remembering changes that are made each time. For a video of the changeover on an FA-ST servo overwrapper, look athttp://www.packagemachinery.com/media/fa-st-size-change/

As the clock in the video shows, a changeover can be done in as little as 10 minutes. This saves downtime on your machine.

Variations within the SKU can lengthen the time for changeover. Product changeover is minimized when the product itself is consistent, within small tolerances. This makes changeover for baked goods less consistent than for trays or or boxes with tight tolerances.

In all cases, servo controls offer the chance to reduce the downtime of changeover when compared to a mechanical overwrapper. Package Machinery has been building servo overwrappers for 10 years, longer than any other machinery manufacturer.

Contact us to discuss further.

instructions for disposing of 3 parts of packaging

Having talked to a lot of caring products manufacturers recently, we are putting out this picture in the hopes that it will inspire better communication between the manufacturers and their consumers. We know that many consumers want to be good with their packaging. But they cannot keep up with changes in packaging and the resulting confusion makes them despair of doing it right.

This small illustration, smaller than the bar code on the package, enables consumers to know what to do with the three components of the packaging they just acquired.

We hope all manufacturers will consider such simple instructions on their packaging going forward.

Package Machinery offers tricks and treats

A treat is offered for those who come in costume.  Receive a diefold wrapped candy. This is a great a delicious way to understand what a diefold  wrap is all about.

Those who want the trick have to learn how to do the wrap in order to get the candy.

Either way you win!!

Discuss our new TTDF diefold wrapper, new Rotary Bander and new Wrapster JR and our upcoming inline FA-XP or  high speed FA-ST overwrappers. We are the wrapping solution if you want to save wrapping materials and keep energy costs low.

We see many customers switching between wrapping materials without realizing the impact on the machine-ability of the new film. Sometimes the film manufacturer switches production facilities or ingredients and the customer is unaware. Sometimes heat and humidity play with the film or paper’s behavior. Often these are issues that the customer is initially unaware of. They simply know they have a wrapping problem.

Three recent issues we have seen:

• Our customer uses both paper and film on their FA-ST wrapper. Recently they switched from film to a foil-flocked paper successfully. Then they switched back to film and ran into problems.  They were unable to figure out why their knife was cutting raggedly. In this case, the knife needed adjusting after the second switch, although it had not needed it after the first one.
• Another customer called to say that their machine had stopped working effectively and consistantly.  Their film supplier had discontinued the film they had been using and was offering a substitute that the supplier indicated was identical in performance. It was not identical in machine-ability however and the machine’s film feed needed adjusting.
• A third customer has a supplier who routinely buys film from a variety of manufacturers based on price. While the gauge and coatings are the same, the film is not always the same though in behavior. The savings in film by using this vendor is often eaten up by the constant adjustment whenever a roll of film is changed.

When the film changes, the knife and film feed may need adjusting. The heat temps for sealing may vary. The crispness of the folds have a direct relationship to the film. At Package Machinery we test lots of different films based on customers’ current and anticipated needs. We work with all major film suppliers and know many of their films. We work with our customers to help them separate film issues from machine issues, so that they can get back to successful wrapping.

FA-ST wrapper film feed

He says, “I have been in a few textile and oilseeds plants where the fan guard on the motor is covered with product. This increases the temperature of the motor and windings and reduces the life of the winding component by 50 percent or more.”

He asks the following. ”Why don’t we ask more questions when we have equipment failures? Here are a few of the reasons:

• Culture: We have created cultures in many plants that if the equipment components fail, make sure we have spares and get them changed as quickly as possible.
• Reactive: We do most of our repairs in a reactive state, so we must have parts and we must do the repairs quickly and without much precision in the work process.
• Training: There is a lack of training to teach people how components fail and, more importantly, how to keep them from failing. Programs such as root cause analysis (RCA) and Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) can be educational processes for critical plant equipment and lead to longer life cycles of the components.”

The issue is not just training, of which there is not enough, nor often enough. Many maintenance issues can be avoided with proper discussion of product impact prior to machine design and build. Everyone knows that salt is corrosive, but how many think about the corrosive impact of flying sugar? or of flour or crumbs building up and impeding air flow? At Package, we have  had to replace bearings and gears for customers because we were not told prior to delivery about how much sugar flew around the plant where our machine was installed.

• What have you learned after you took delivery of a machine that you would change if you could?
• What could have been done differently?
• What is your recommendation for training?
• Would preventive maintenance training help?

Please share your thoughts.

We know our FA-ST servo wrapper will run at speeds up to 150 packages per minute because we have customers who achieve those speeds. But others cannot seem to get to their desired speed

hand feeding a wrapping machine

We know our machine can do a 10 minute changeover because some of our customers do it in less. Others struggle to change over from one product size to the next for an hour or more.

What makes the difference?

• knowing your product, flaws and all, and sharing that knowledge with the wrapping machine builder
• knowing your product’s tolerances for speed and directional change
• having knowledgeable expectations about feeding product to the wrapper
• staying within tolerances for product size variation prior to wrapping
• having knowledgeable employees who know your product and have a basic understanding of machine function and operation
• having trainable employees who want to learn to operate and care for your machinery

Having all of  these will not guarantee that you can achieve the impossible, but the absence of even one will certainly slow you down.

Nothing substitutes for knowledgeable people working together.

You may have seen his articles in the New Yorker magazine. Gawande is a surgeon in Boston and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. While his book is primarily about how checklists can improve outcomes in medicine by demonstrating how that has worked for him in the operating room and how it works in the airline industry, his concepts have applications for all of us in our daily as well as business lives.

Package Machinery has had checklists for installation and training and for machine assembly but now we know they need regular revision and updating. in light of issues we have had, we have developed a checklist for discussion entitled Expectations in which we look at making sure we understand what our customer’s expectations are, whether we can meet them and make sure they have the capability to meet their own. We do run off and testing in our facility before we ship to a customer to make sure we have done it all right and we have checklists for that.

ISO 9000-9001 does this in another way by documenting processes within the organization. WHile ISO 9000-9001 is a great corporate goal, I think checklists will get us most of the way there.  Somehow I think Atul Gawande’s book is a much easier read than ISO guidelines.

Kate

1. You get  high wrap quality with minimal investment in knowledge and time with Package Machinery’s semi-automatic overwrapper, the Wrapster.
2. Installation cost is minimal for a semi-automatic overwrapper. Hook it up to an air supply and plug it in. The manual tells all.
3. A semi-automatic wrapper  costs less to run because the skill level of staff to operate the machine is minimal.
4. A semi-automatic wrapper costs less to maintain. It does not require highly skilled maintenance staff to support it.  It is brand new and comes with a one year  warranty.
5. Changeover is simple and easy. Mechanical machines take a long time to set up when a package size changes. Wrapster set up is done in couple of minutes with an Allen wrench.
6. Size parts are much less expensive. For lots of short product runs, there is no better option in overwrapping than the Wrapster.

Of course, all this depends on your volume of product to wrap within your time constraints and the the skill level of your existing maintenance employees.