IDM | Site report Flexibility is a trump for TINE Elopak’s new Flex platform machines make liquid milk filling easier Elopak is now in the middle of a phase to introduce two new platforms of filling machines for fresh and ESL products to the market. One of the first commercial installations of the new fillers took place at the TINE dairy plant in Sem in the Oslo area. IDM had the chance to have a closer look onto it. Gro Rommen Anderssen, head of the Sem plant, explains that TINE produces a great many varieties of liquid milk products. This is an answer to consumers‘ wishes for more regionality and transparency. Spread all over Norway, TINE supplies different regional packaging designs to the market that add up to seasonal products like the mountain milk and cream ‚Stolsmjolk‘. The Sem plant alone manufactures 14 types of liquid milk and has to manage three to four product changes per line per day. The suitability of the two old filling lines supplied by Elopak no longer met the needs of the growing portfolio and complexity so TINE looked for a more flexible set of filling equipment – which they found in Elopak’s new machine platform built in Japan by Shikoku Kakoki. The Flex machine platform 34 · 9 2016 | international-dairy.com Olav Klonteig, Director EQS Application at Elopak, highlights what makes up the essence of the new Flex machine platforms (marked in the machine designation with an additizonal "F"), one for standard sizes between 250 ml and 1,136 ml and one for large packs from 1.5 to 2.0 ltr: standardisation and simplification of the machine construction, greatly improved hygienic design, increased efficiency in terms of TCO and overall greater flexibility. In fact, a changeover from one filling size to another takes only a few moments thanks to pre-set recipes and servo drive technology that also make the machines less noisy. A sophisticated HMI together with data capture assists the operator in all matters from feeding the right number of carton blanks into the package magazine up to troubleshooting. The two-lane fillers operate each lane independently from the other. It is possible to fill two different packages or products simultaneously or to run one lane while doing product maintenance etc. on the other. Platform 1 comes with a capacity of 7,000 packs/hr in a one-lane and 14,000 packs in a two-lane configuration. Platform 2 offers throughputs of 5,000 and 10,000 packages per hour, respectively. And maybe even as important to processors as flexibility is that the new fillers require about 25% less floorspace compared to the "old" Elopak machines. The carton blanks are erected in the normal way but for disinfection Elopak has Gro Rømmen Anderssen, head of the TINE plant in Sem, together with Andreas Weselka and André Dybvik from Elopak (photo: IDM) TINE dairy in Sem has been running two new Elopak Flex filling machines since mid 2015 (photo: IDM)
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