Frenzel Benefits From Ishida’s ’Retail Ready’ Solution
15 September 2005
Leading German frozen food manufacturer Frenzel has installed an Ishida Retail Ready Line at its factory in Thuringia to provide a comprehensive packing system for a new range of trays that enable frozen meals to be steamed cooked in the microwave.
The installation of the Ishida Retail Ready Line (RRL) meets Frenzel’s requirement for a highly automated and low-maintenance packing system. The RRL covers the entire product weighing and packing process - tray denesting, weighing, filling, checkweighing, tray sealing, metal detection, cardboard sleeving and automatic packing into cases – to produce trays in a ’ready to sell’ condition for the retail trade.
Ishida took full responsibility for the project management of the entire line, including adapting it to suit the specific factory layout and conditions. The RRL currently produces six varieties of frozen meat and vegetarian ready meals. Output is 45 trays per minute, but there is scope for further speed increases. The system is easy to clean and maintain for optimum hygiene and performance and enables product / format changeovers in less than ten minutes. The system is also flexible enough to be easily adapted to handle new tray formats or food products.
Operating at -8°C, product mixes are packed in 300g and 450g trays. Elevators convey four different types of frozen products to a 24 head Ishida multihead weigher for mix applications. The weigher selects product from a combination of hoppers that comes closest to the target weight for each ingredient, and discharges a correctly balanced meal into the tray.
A second 10-head multihead weigher for single components adds sauces consisting of small balls of butter. As the proportion taken up by these balls is also accurately defined in terms of weight, the entire product mix therefore consists of five accurately weighed components. Depending on the recipe, fresh sauces can also be added via separate sauce dispensers.
Trays are fed to beneath the weighers from an Ishida tray denester and filled via an Ishida filling system and twin sauce dispenser.
The filled trays are conveyed to an integrated checkweigher, which ensures that any over- or underweight trays are identified and automatically rejected prior to sealing. This function is designed to save packaging material, as rejected trays can be reused and no top seal film is wasted.
In the Ishida QX 775 traysealer, a protective top seal is added to each tray and cut off exactly at the tray edges, resulting in optimised pack presentation and a 5% reduction in top seal film.
The sealing process itself is very precise and ensures the highest possible seal quality and integrity. During format changeovers, a unique system enables the sealing tool to be changed in less than five minutes. Changing the top seal film takes no more than three minutes.
The top seal trays then pass through a metal detector for additional quality assurance and a sleeving machine, where attractive pre-printed cardboard sleeves are fitted. Finally, the packs are fed to an Ishida Flexible Packing System (FPS), which automatically takes the ready meal trays in sets of three from the conveyor belt and places them into pre-erected cardboard cases for subsequent case closing and palletising.
Frenzel has become the third-largest player in the German frozen food market in only a few years. Based in Saxony, with sites in Brandenburg and Thuringia, the company has a reputation for bringing technical innovations onto the market.
Frenzel chose Ishida after a successful experience of using an Ishida multihead weigher. As the Thuringia factory manager Ronald Neubert explains, “In three years, we did not have to carry out a single repair on the weigher, so we were very happy to buy from the same manufacturer again.
“We are very satisfied with Ishida’s flexibility,” he continues. “Whenever we required an engineer, somebody turned up at once. We also welcome the fact that Ishida is now investing in its own premises in Germany.”
