At the Glanbia Foods Twin Falls cheese processing plant, OAL Group provides 24 hour support to the chilling process facilities, including ongoing maintenance of their Odenberg chillers. Recently OAL Group extended this support by completing a mechanical and controls project to improve Glanbia Foods’ packing machine, resulting in improved product quality and a more cost-effective bagging process.

Retaining Packaging Integrity

At the Twin Falls site, cheese is produced in 40 pound blocks and placed in standard cardboard box packaging with liner collar for shipping.

When the cheese blocks are placed in a polyethene bag and vacuumed sealed, the bag gusset ends extend from each corner. Occasionally the vacuum sealed bag gusset would get trapped between the boxes.
This intermittently proved to be an issue for Glanbia Foods’ customers.  When the packaged cheese block was run through a de-boxing machine, the gusset on the outside of the liner fold could be cut by the de-boxing blade or torn when pulled away from the cardboard, breaking the vacuum seal on the cheese block when removed. Rudy Jozelic, Plant Manager at the Glanbia Foods Twin Falls site explains,

“In this instance, the cheese is then open to the atmosphere and the risks of mould. This is further exacerbated because the cheese is often de-boxed and stored for a long period of time before being used. It is thus of high importance that the cheese block remains vacuumed sealed until then.”

Solution

After observing the packing process, OAL Group developed a mechanical and controls solution to resolve the cheese boxing issue. By preventing the cheese block gusset from being accidentally cut or torn, OAL Group has supported Glanbia Foods in improving its packing performance. Rudy Jozelic adds,

“OAL Group really understood our needs and came up with a great solution to overcome our bagging issue. The packing machine is now running well and we haven’t received a related customer complaint since the installation.”

Following the resolution of the problem, Glanbia Foods has been able to continue to use gusseted bags, a more cost-effective option than non-gusseted vacuum bags, leading to cost efficiencies as well as happy customers.

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