SubscribeFresh Pasta Production Picks Up Speed Thanks To Ishida
The speed and accuracy of the Ishida Fresh Food Weigher (FFW) has enabled German manufacturer Geflügelhof Martin Zapf to double its production of 'home-made' fresh pasta whilst reducing product giveaway.
'Spätzle', irregular-length noodles extruded from a durum wheat dough, are a German delicacy commonly made at home or in restaurants. Zapf has for many years made its own version for retail, with an authentic 'home-made' taste.
Zapf wanted to automate the packing process in order to make its product available to a much wider consumer base. Automation was necessary because the existing system of manually weighing the noodles into 500g plastic bags was a tedious and time-consuming job, involving five workers using bench scales. In addition, giveaway was unacceptably high.
The speed and accuracy of the Ishida Fresh Food Weigher (FFW) has enabled German manufacturer Geflügelhof Martin Zapf to double its production of ‘home-made’ fresh pasta whilst reducing product giveaway.
Initial experiments with a single-head weigher encountered several problems, including a lack of weighing accuracy and consistency. It proved impossible to get the product to feed smoothly, mainly due to its well-known ability to cling stubbornly to contact surfaces, leaving the operator with the difficult job of making frequent and rapid manual corrections.
Multihead Food Weigher
Company owner Martin Zapf contacted Ishida Germany to devise a suitable solution, and Ishida recommended its Fresh Food Weigher (FFW), a recently developed multihead weigher with a linear layout. The FFW provides the speed and accuracy of combination weighing, but enables an operator to comfortably oversee and control the critical entry of very sticky products into the weighing system.
Using only a fraction of its output capacity of 40 weighments per minute, the line has doubled weekly output to two tons. Although demand is still rising, this means that at present the line operates for one shift, two days a week - half of the time needed when packing was carried out manually. The consequent reduction in operators and packers from five to two also enables Zapf to redeploy workers, a step that means less stressful and more varied work for all concerned.
Fresh Food Production Speed and Accuracy
As to accuracy, Zapf's daily production reports show a significant reduction in giveaway, demonstrating that more packs are produced from a given amount of noodle dough.
Martin Zapf is very pleased with the new Ishida weigher, commenting that, "speed and accuracy are both impressive."
The company is keen to preserve traditional quality while maximising production efficiency, and the fresh food weigher has made the difference between a situation where Geflügelhof Martin Zapf could not pack fast enough to meet demand, to one where it can expand quite freely for some time with the equipment it has.
As Martin Zapf confirms, "In the agri-food-business, we like to think long term".
15 January 2008