All-Fill, a manufacturer of filling machines and packaging equipment, creates customized solutions for its customers in a variety of industries ranging from pharma to pet products. In food and beverage, especially, there is a need for hygienic designs. For example, when one of its customers needed a system for bagging stuffed olives, peppers, spices, and oil, Raymond Arra, sales manager at All-Fill, knew he would need to include a wash down conveyor as part of the turnkey system to accommodate a high level of cleanliness in the design.
Arra reached out to Michigan-based Dynamic Conveyor, which makes a hygienic line of conveyor systems that are ideal for the food packaging and processing industries. The patented lightweight and modular design of the DynaClean line features a design that allows the conveyor to be quickly disassembled, cleaned, sanitized, and returned to service without the use of tools.
All-Fill placed the order for the DynaClean conveyor and then went to work designing an automatic system where the product is filled into bags utilizing a combination scale, thereby replacing the manual process of bagging the product. The bagged product is then conveyed on a DynaClean conveyor to an accumulation table where operators remove the bags of stuffed olives, peppers, spices, and oil which are sold to salad bars.
It was a good design, but there was a problem. The customer recognized that the flow of the line was not ideal for the existing packaging room and changed the layout from an in-line discharge to a 90° perpendicular discharge. However, the DynaClean conveyor would not work with the new system layout because the infeed section was too short for the newly proposed system design.
The good news was that the DynaClean conveyor is modular and has much more flexibility than a fixed length stainless steel conveyor. All-Fill was able to purchase an additional section of conveyor from Dynamic Conveyor that allowed the existing conveyor to grow in length by 24 inches. “I had no idea the DynaClean conveyor system was modular and could be retrofitted in the field,” Arra says, noting that if a stainless steel conveyor had been originally purchased for the turnkey packaging system, they would have been required to purchase a whole new conveyor to fit within the design constraints of the newly proposed layout.
Arra—and the customer—were relieved to learn that they would not need to purchase a whole new conveyor. Dynamic Conveyor was able to provide the additional section of the conveyor and Arra was able to rebuild the conveyor. “It was very easy to install,” he recalls. “It took about an hour to make the necessary changes using common hand tools. And even though the conveyor has been modified, it looks like a brand new conveyor.”
