The kettle-cooked products are pumped to a custom-built four-nozzle filler that hot-fills them into multilayer, coextruded, metallized polyolefin film pouches and seals them at rates of 220 pouches/min (55 cycles/min). Average pouch size is 110 mm long x 90 mm wide x 10 mm deep. TSC Foods deems the rollstock and form/fill/seal equipment suppliers confidential.
In the past, TSC used a metal detector and a checkweigher to fulfill government-mandated inspection requirements. But when the company needed higher production speeds and wanted to ensure it was meeting 5mm stainless steel metal detection specifications, the existing inspection equipment could not cope. Even after TSC installed a higher-speed checkweigher, consistently reliable weight verification remained a problem.
Once it was clear to TSC Foods that their new system was not performing at the level desired, the company began searching for alternatives. TSC’s Area Manager Shane Barrick, responsible for this production area, contacted various major inspection companies before finding that X-ray technology has checkweighing and metal detection capabilities that might respond to the company’s needs.
