A tomato grower sought to improve throughput when sealing trays of cherry tomatoes and turned to Crawford’s technical team for help. Our experts suggested reorienting the trays so the long edge entered the machine first, increasing impressions to four per cycle.
This increased production from 45 to 60 packs per minute—a 30% efficiency gain. Impressed by the results, the grower upgraded their SL6 machine with the advanced Revolution Tray Sealer for even greater performance.
This case presented us with two unique challenges.
1 – The existing tray sealing packaging line consisted of a competitors top sealing equipment and the client had been experiencing satisfactory results with it
2 – How to increase the existing packaging line speeds to accommodate the higher throughput volumes the customer wanted
Although these problems at first seemed separate, our Tray Sealing solution would help solve them together.
Our Packaging Specialist went to our client and presented them with the benefits of our Packaging Automation Tray Sealing machines. The client was impressed with our supplier’s equipment and its unique benefits. However, they would be willing to go without those benefits if it meant they could increase packaging speeds.
Working with Packaging Automation our Packaging Specialist and technical team turned to finding a solution to increase packaging speed. The current machines could run 3 impressions (sealed containers) per cycle due to the large size of the trays being sealed.
Packaging Automation and Crawford’s technical team suggested that by turning the trays so the long edge led into the machine the client could increase their impressions to 4 impressions per cycle. This effectively would increase their packs per minute from 45ppm to 60ppm, an increase of 30%.
Packaging Automation provided an SL6 Wide Bodied Tray Sealing Machine with the new tooling to seal 4 trays per cycle. The client was impressed with the solution and the increased throughput that it provided. After the testing phase completed the client requested that the SL6 Wide Body machine be upgraded to a Packaging Automation Revolution Tray Sealer that was capable of using the updated 4 impression tooling which achieved the higher results.
