“Stronger together” – this is the ambition of the market-leading technology providers Ishida and Heat and Control. Their new worldwide cooperation and company alliance, HCI Snack Solutions, offers the snack industry fully integrated production lines from a single source.

By Dr. Bernhard Reichenbach

The official starting shot for the new cooperation was announced during a recent snacks “open house” event at the Ishida Europe headquarters in Birmingham/England. Ishida Europe Managing Director Dave Tiso explained: “The snack industry has already benefited in the past from our cooperation with Heat and Control on a variety of different projects. This has led us to expand and institutionalise this cooperation”. Tony Caridis, President of Heat and Control, added: “This partnership produces valuable added benefits which, in turn, make our customers around the world more competitive”.

The scope of products and services offered by these partnered companies encompasses every component, ranging from raw product preparation through to the processing, seasoning and coating of snacks. It extends to weighing, packaging and quality control. The individual machines are optimally calibrated with one another. The new cooperation further provides the snack industry with a contact partner for all of its related issues and concerns.

One of the items presented during the recent open house event was Ishida’s new ACP-700 case packer for fully automated final packaging, now with maximised performance and flexibility. Dave Tiso emphasised: “This case packer takes up less space than any other comparable machine. In addition, it can easily be integrated into existing production lines”. The new case packer processes a wide range of carton sizes and bag formats with widths of between 108 mm and 330 mm. It dispenses up to 150 bags per minute, respectively up to ten master cartons per minute.

Ishida’s portfolio additionally includes what the company claims is the world’s fastest vertical form, fill and seal machine. Dave Tiso says: “Our latest development, Inspira, is an ideal packaging solution for the high-performance processing of snacks and savoury snack items. Despite its high speed, Inspira continuously ensures flawless packaging quality”. Inspira can process bags at speeds up to 200 per minute.

At packaging trade fair FachPack in Nuremberg/Germany, Ishida is set to present high-performance food product processing systems. On show will be complete packaging lines, multi-head scales, quality control systems, and production optimisation software solutions corresponding with the tenets and requirements of Packaging 4.0.

The food products industry is also striving to achieve the “Smart Factory”. The new Sentinel software allows production to be monitored and optimised remotely. All of the systems presented by Ishida at the FachPack fair can be connected with this web-based Sentinel programme for the permanent analysis of data in the interest of increasing overall system efficiency.

Systems for reliable quality control represent another priority focus. At FackPack fair, Ishida will also be presenting its IX-GN X-ray inspection system, which combines the detection of foreign particles with weight control. IX-GN is a perfect all-rounder for a wide range of food products, reliably detecting impurities and foreign particles made of metal, glass, stone or plastic, even in products where such detection is difficult like cereals.

FachPack, Halle 2, Stand 413