Vertical Integration Rules at Incobrasa

Incobrasa Industries Ltd. is a family-owned company that began in Brazil as a producer and processor of soybeans. The firm created a soybean processing plant in Gilman, Ill., that went into operation in 1997. The enormous site just off Interstate-57—smack dab in the middle of Illinois soybean country—now includes soybean crushing, an oil refinery, a biodiesel production plant, and a packaging facility for food-grade vegetable oil in three formats: steel cans, PET  bottles, and HDPE bottles.

The Xtra 6 takes care of blowing, filling, and capping of both 16- and 48-oz bottles yet occupies a relatively small amount of space.The packaging facility shows an impressive level of vertical integration, as all cans and bottles except for HDPE bottles are made in-house before being filled. “We don’t have enough volume in HDPE to justify self-manufacture,” says Incobrasa Packaging Manager Mariano Moliner Ramirez. Here we’ll look at 4-L cans and 16- and 48-oz PET, since the manufacturing systems behind those formats are the ones most recently upgraded.

The newest upgrade in PET packaging took place late last year. Previously the firm did not produce a 16-oz format, but for its 48-oz size it would injection mold its own preforms, blow bottles, store bottles in silos, and then unscramble bottles into a rotary filler that fed a rotary capper. This approach was greatly improved with the recent arrival of a Sincro Bloc blow/fill/cap system from SIPA. Included in a compact footprint is a preform hopper and infeed, an Xtra 6 six-cavity blow molder, a 30-valve Electronic W net-weigh filler, and a nine-head rotary capper made by Arol. Both 16- and 48-oz bottles receive the same 33-mm injection molded PP closure from CSI. Also part of the package is an inspection system from FT System that checks to see that every cap is on correctly. Any bottle with a problematic cap is automatically rejected.Exiting the labeler, bottles pass through an ink-jet unit for printing of date code.

“Key goals were to add the 16-oz format to our portfolio and to reduce the footprint of the equipment needed for the 16- and 48-oz sizes,” says Ramirez. “In the past, we’d put the 48-oz bottles that we blew into big silos each holding 100,000 bottles and then send bottles to an unscrambler that fed the filler. With this Sincro Bloc blower/filler/capper in operation, we no longer store bottles and we no longer need a bottle unscrambler. It saves so much space.”

Efficiency and speed are greatly improved, too. The 16-oz bottles are blown and filled at 15,000/hr and the 48-oz at 9,000/hr. And thanks to quick-release tooling on the Xtra 6 blow molder that eliminates the need for tools when changing from 16- to 48-oz bottles, it takes 45 seconds or less to change a blow mold.

Installed along with the new blower/filler/capper block was one of SIPA’s Xform 300 injection molding machines to make the preforms for both 16- and 48-oz bottles. The injection molding cycle for the larger 38-g preform is 15 seconds, and it’s 14 seconds for the smaller 24-g preform. Ramirez says that from an installation perspective and from an ongoing machine maintenance perspective, the injection molding system is just another part of the broader SIPA portfolio. “It’s a single-source aspect that we find very attractive,” he adds.

Sheets of decorated tinplate are pulled into a machine that slits them into six before welding each piece into a can body.Ramirez says that as preforms enter the blow molder, UV light eliminates bacteria and a deionizer eliminates dust that might be in the preform. He adds that the compact oven on the Xtra 6 blow molder is very economical from an energy consumption standpoint. According to SIPA, ceramic reflectors optimize the use of energy used in heating the preforms. Also adding a measure of energy efficiency is that the oven section has a laminar flow that keeps preforms at a constant and optimal temperature.

All container transfers—from preform oven to blow molding tools to filling and right on through capping—are done by star wheels that use neck ring grippers. The absence of platforms on which bottles rest as they move from one station to the next helps keep changeover time to a minimum when switching back and forth from the 16- to the 48-oz bottle.Freshly welded can bodies emerge from this machine and move into a system that creates a flange on top and bottom, creates the beading on the sidewall, seams on a bottom, and seams on a top.