IDM | Packaging A cut ahead ALPMA – Fully automated complete lines for cheese portioning 1 4 3 Packing rooms for cheese have undergone some major changes over the last 15 years or so. Where formerly, they contained a variety of machines with little or no interlinking and a great deal of work was performed manually, today, cheese is packaged on fully automated complete lines. This makes economic sense, explained Uwe Becher from ALPMA at a German cheese tech forum in June, and not only for large-scale enterprises. Mr. Becher "walked" his audience through the entire line, from infeed right through to fixed-weight portioning of the cheese. Mr. Becher described cheese preparation with cutting-edge technology based 22 · 9 2016 | international-dairy.com on projects already realised by ALPMA. Fully automated depalletising centres can be installed both for the "Euroblocks" customary in Germany and Cheddar. Here, the Cheddar cheeses are first taken out of the cases without puncturing the film and the film is then removed in the usual way. Film-ripened cheese which has drawn air is automatically discharged to allow inspection by personnel and the removal of any mouldy cheese before further processing. The cheeses are then fed to a central portion cutter, whereby a number of different cheeses (in the case of Cheddar, for example, two types) are packed onto the cutting lines by a robot. Fixed-weight portioning The cheeses are now ready for cutting into bars and subsequent flush-cutting. In the case of Emmenthaler cheese, Becher mentioned the established fixedweight portioning with a capacity of 3 t/h used, for example, by Zott (IDM reported on this), which makes it possible to cut the bars into precisely fixedweight portions with the help of an Xray image and a scan of the dimensions of the cheese. ALPMA has already supplied almost 50 of these lines, gaining an enormous amount of experience in the process. And as Mr. Becher emphasised, such investments pay off "very quickly". Depalletisation of Euroblocks 5 2 Cheese pallet infeed station Robot Collection point for empty pallets and intermediate boards Inspection point (leakage check) Film unwrapping machine and bar cutter
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