The new Weigh-Batcher from Ishida Europe enables packers to work efficiently with a single multihead weigher to optimise arrangement and presentation of product in trays.
The company says that operators can now produce a handcrafted presentation of tray contents before sealing, at typical speeds (with eight operators) of 90ppm and with product giveaway of less than 1g per pack.
Each accurately-weighed product is rapidly conveyed to any one of up to eight workstations. There, an operator transfers it to a tray, styles it and places the tray on the ‘out’ belt, for sealing, labelling and checking. The station automatically informs the system once the filled and styled tray has left, triggering the sending of another weighed item to be packed.
Designed for all fresh or frozen foods which are suitable for belt conveying, the new Weigh-Batcher allows the optimisation of tray presentation, reduces product giveaway to around 1% and achieves typical packing speeds of 50 trays per minute. It also reduces labour by up to 60% (compared with entirely manual operation) and its compact design gives a high return on floor space.
The Weigh-Batcher also features a user-friendly control panel which allows the performance of each operator and each shift to be monitored.
Ishida’s Weigh-Batcher is ideal for meat, poultry, fish and seafood where styling or other manual re-working of filled trays is essential to achieve a high-quality tray presentation.
A major factor in the launch of the Weigh-Batcher is the development of the Ishida Screw Feeder mulithead weigher, which is capable of handling the stickiest products.
Options available with the Ishida Weigh-Batcher include special hoppers fitted with scrapers to prevent product from clinging to the gates, and adapters to enable the workstations to accept product from the weigher directly into bags. The number of workstations can be varied from one to eight.
