Have you ever wondered what the inside of food plant looks like? Yeah me too. Two weeks ago I took a tour of the new International Foods plant, and what was inside the plant amazed me. So much going on, different moving parts and products being packaged everywhere you look. That’s where EPIC comes in. EPIC automated all of the packaging systems inside that plant, and it was no small job.
The cocoa room is an isolated enclosed room specifically for the cocoa products that International Foods packages. Ever drank a glass of premade chocolate milk? You’ve had an International Foods product.
At the rear of the room is a very large hopper, where the super sacs of cocoa, sugar, and other products are loaded. The products are blended inside the hopper and are transported to a secondary hopper that lies above the bag filler. An employee orients the bag underneath the filler where a preset amount of powder is dumped into the bag.
The employee then sends the filled bag down a conveyer where a sealer, closes the top of the bag. After traveling through the sealer products are sent up another set of conveyers out the door to a pallet to be shipped.
The next packaging room is the white powder room, where different mixtures of flour products are blended together and packaged to be shipped. Very similar to the cocoa room a blending hopper is loaded with super sacs from the top. The ingredients are blended together and transported to a hopper above the filler. An employee again orients the bag to be filled, sends it down the conveyer to be sealed and sent out of the room to a pallet to be shipped.
The third and final packaging room is a liquid packaging line. It is a much different style than the first two, which are both for a dry powder application. The liquid line has an employee at the beginning of the line, who pulls bottles from a box and puts them onto a circulating accumulation table where they que down the line. These bottles get filled in an inline filler. The filler nozzle moves on a loop, filling six bottles at a time.
When a bottle is full, it continues down the line to the capping station. The caps are held in a large hopper were they are rotated through an orienteer and carried down to the top of the bottle and placed. After capping, bottles continue down the line, where three rotating wheels tighten the lids onto the bottles. The line ends at another accumulation table, where an employee fills boxes that go on a separate conveyer to the taper and palletizing station.
Having the opportunity to take a tour like that really put it into perspective what EPIC is capable of. Being a new employee here, I hadn’t fully grasped the capabilities that our team has. After the tour, I can’t get over how amazingly smooth and quickly the whole operation ran. No matter the application, size, or type of job it is, we can make it happen.
Seeing a system like that fully operational put that into perspective for me. If you’re in search of upgrading or creating a brand new turnkey system, you’re in the right place. Our engineers are the best of the best when it comes to automation and turnkey packaging line solutions.