COVER STORY
Open 1.89-liter jugs of Montour sauces pass through an IQ³ model metal detector for Loma Systems for their final quality assurance check prior to capping further downstream the Capmatic bottling line.
do something drastic,” says Montour, explaining that the plant’s new state-of-the-art bottling line— installed as part of a comprehensive $3.5-million facility expansion completed in April of this year— was designed specifically to facilitate such agile manufacturing f lexibility, while also enabling the company to launch its own product brand in a fastgrowing segment of the food market. Installed as a turnkey system by renowned Montreal-headquartered packaging machinery OME (original equipment manufacturer) Capmatic Ltd., the new bottling line has done wonders for the company’s manufacturing and packaging competence, according to Montour, who says he was initially attracted to Capmatic based on the manufacturer’s well-earned reputation for an extensive product range of top-quality unscrambling, filling, capping and labeling equipment that can work with a wide range of bottles, jars and jugs in a multitude of shapes and sizes. “One of our big desires was to present a betterpackaged product to our grocery store customers,” explains Montour, relating that the sheer weight of the bulky four-liter jug previously used to ship the sauces was not very easy to handle by the stores’ deli and department staff, weighing about five kilograms (11 pounds) each. “So in an effort to help our customers out, we decided to create a smaller, 1.89-liter bottle that only weighed approximately 2.3 kilograms (five pounds), and which is also more ergonomic,” Montour relates.
“We also wanted to incorporate a jug handle that would be easier for people to manipulate for easier distribution and handling,” says Montour, asserting that the Capmatic equipment delivers the same high-quality output with the 1.89-liter sauce and the one-liter broth jugs—supplied by DeltaPac Packaging Inc.—as it does with the retail-bound 350-ml bottle supplied by the Montreal-based Ampak Inc., with Berry Plastics Corporation supplying all the bottle cap sizes via its local distributor Roda Packaging Inc. of Laval, Que.
Cooking Skills Armed with a new Blentech 2,000-liter cooker and a completely automated Capmatic packaging line, the Blainville plant is more than capable of meeting the current customer demand volumes of 800,000 liters of finished sauces, broths and marinades annually. “We are now able to produce three batches of 1,800 liters of product in a single eight-hour shift,” Montour marvels. “The improvement in our production capabilities is really a beautiful thing!” The main cog of the Capmatic line installed at Montour is the fully-automatic Accurofill volumetric piston filler that works equally well for liquids, semi-viscous and viscous products for all types of plastic, metal and glass containers using a unique combination of volumetric piston technology and rotary valve control to enable extremely fast and accurate filling rates.
“It’s a very good piece of equipment for us,” comments Montour. “Although we have only had it for a short while, we are quite impressed with its ability to fill our jugs and bottles in an accurate manner.” While the Accurofill has not yet tested its filling mettle with the 350-ml retail bottles, Montour reports the machine is able to fill 24 1.89-liter jugs, or just over 30 one-liter jugs, per minute. Other components on the production line include Capmatic’s SortStar—a no-change-part bottle unscrambler that Montour has already discovered to be able to handle a diverse range of plastic bottles. Incorporating centrifugal disks and adjustable guides, the SortStar is equipped with numeric counters to facilitate mechanical adjustments for easy, repeatable changes. A robust BeltStar stainless-steel capper and retorquer from Capmatic easily handles a wide range of containers and caps to ensure optimal quality and control with innovative magnetic slip-clutch technology. “The BeltStar provides an HMI (humanmachine interface) viewing of the torque application giving us verification of each bottle or jug that passes through it,” says Montour, complimenting the user-friendliness of Rockwell Automation’s Allen-Bradley PanelView Plus 600 HMI terminal, along with the BeltStar’s optional tourque verification and reject features. A Capmatic SuperJolly single-chuck capper is used to tighten various cap styles, including the continuous thread (CT) caps, child-resistant (CR) caps, and roll-on pilfer-proof (ROPP) caps. According to Capmatic, the SuperJolly is interchangeable between screw capping and crimping. The system employs a Cognex machine vision control camera system to provide quick verification that each tightened cap has been perfectly aligned— quickly rejecting any misaligned or otherwise imperfect caps right off the production line The line also includes the Orientor—a Capmaticmade orientation device that aligns all the container handles in the same direction prior to the filling process. Product labels are applied to the Montour jugs via the easy-to-set-up and operate Capmatic LabelStar 2/1T single-head system that accurately applies partial-wrap or full-wrap and panel-wrap labels to a wide variety of container types, making optimal use of stepper motor technology that provides longterm accuracy and eliminates the service requirements inherent with the use of clutches and brakes. Other equipment includes a large special cool-
The LabelStar 2/1T single-head labeler from Capmatic neatly applies adhesives labels to A Markem-Imaje 8018i coder applies lot and best-before information to the product labels the front of 1.89-liter jugs at throughput speeds of up to 24 containers per minute. before they are applied onto the filled plastic containers.
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CANADIAN PACKAGING • OCTOBER 2012