Food Processing

Electro-mechanical design and fabrication comprise a great portion of our work.  There is one project which stands as an excellent example, as well as an interesting story of opportunity and challenge.

The vast majority of food processing and packaging technology is geared toward the making and packaging of products.
   

Prototype of candy bar strip head

One client's need was completely different.  They supply fast food chains and ice cream manufactures across the country with crushed candy bars, in bulk, for blending into drink products such as "Blizzards", toppings for treats, and raw ingredients in flavor enhanced ice cream.

As the largest supplier of crushed candy in the country, their problem was to unwrap candy bars at an astonishing rate.  You would think their consumption of several million bars per month would afford them special treatment from the manufacturer, at least enough to be able to buy unwrapped bars in bulk, but this was not possible.  Therefore, their only option was a room full of employees manually unwrapping candy bars. It is easy to imagine all the problems associated with this arrangement, from low productivity and moral, to high absenteeism and conflict.  Additionally, they simply could not put enough workers in place to meet the demand.
    

Clearly the challenge is to design and fabricate an automatic, high through- put system.  The solution is an artful blending of mechanical, pneumatic and control electronics engineering.  Five individual computers, which were designed and fabricated in-house, control the machine.  Each strip head is managed by its own computer controller.  In turn, the four controllers and overall machine operation are under the supervision of the "master" computer.  The final design comprises four independent strip heads, each autonomously processing one bar every second, which equates to more than 14,000 bars per hour.

Candy bar strip head in feed

Prototype strip head controller

DoBoy continues flow wrap packaging machine

As with many of our clients and much of our work, machine maintenance, repair and modification represent primary opportunities for CRD within the food processing industry.  Often we are asked to modify equipment to accommodate different products or package sizes which differ from the original machine specification.  Additionally, control enhancement and technology upgrades along with rebuilds are typical of our services. 

"Econoseal" box forming machine

    
The "DoBoy" continuous flow-wrap packaging and sealing machine and the "Econoseal" box forming machine pictured are representative of equipment found in the pre-shipping area of food processing plants.  It is exactly this kind of equipment that we are often called upon to repair, upgrade or modify.  Usual requests included replacing old defective electronic controls with updated and improved units, modifying ways and guides to facilitate different package sizes and designing improvements or additional features into existing machines.
   

pre-loaders for Econoseal machine

 The four little trays are "pre-loaders" for the "Econoseal" box forming machine.  This simple set of trays allows an assistant to stage product for the machine operator which saves considerable time between loads.  Although nowhere near as fast as an automatic loader the engineering solution resulting in these inexpensive trays significantly increased through-put  for a modest expenditure.
    

vintage large bowl mixers

The large bowl mixers are another example of field engineering repairs.  Several components had been seriously damaged and were no longer available from the factory.  CRD reverse designed and then fabricated these components, substituted off the shelf parts where possible, and swiftly returned the mixers to production.

Electronic mail 

Support Engineers:
JohnS@CRD-Colorado.com
RayB@CRD-Colorado.com

Mechanical and Packaging Engineering:
MitchS@CRD-Colorado.com