We look at the importance of food packaging and the types of machinery available to support businesses. Various sectors of the industry want efficient systems. Customers are the final beneficiaries.
When you go to the supermarket, you select your favourite products and then take them home and enjoy your tasty meals, snacks and desserts. However, there is a huge amount of planning and effort on behalf of food producers, suppliers and manufacturers to ensure they are not only providing fresh produce, but that it is compliant with strict regulations surrounding food and food packaging. Special food packaging machinery is used to weigh, measure, bag and seal all types of items, from cereals and sweets to biscuits and baked goods.
If you work in the food packaging industry, there is a range of machines, products and packaging solutions available, with some of the most helpful listed below:
Pet foods
Wet and dry pet food can be weighed, bagged and presented in attractive packaging and specially designed machinery can help your production line to remain fast and efficient, reducing spillage and waste and keeping your product flow fast and smooth.
Cereals
Bespoke machinery can mix the right ingredients, such as fruit, oats and nuts, in exactly the right quantities for each type of cereal. These machines are specifically designed to reduce dust (caused by products like muesli) and to prevent dried fruit sticking to the equipment, offering a speedy solution to a fairly complex packaging requirement.
Biscuits and baked goods
Nobody wants to buy broken biscuits, so it is important that production lines use specially configured machinery that can gently handle the products. These machines can also be programmed to mix exactly the right configurations for variety packs, offering beautifully presented bags and eye-catching packaging.
Sweets and confectionery
Sticky, sugary sweets taste great as a treat, but they can play havoc with the machinery used to make, sort and package them. Installing the right hardware can help to keep sugar dust to a minimum, easily deal with sticky jelly substances and withstand the potentially abrasive properties of sugar coatings.
Pasta
Spaghetti, tagliatelle, fusilli… pasta remains as popular as ever. Production factories can take advantage of technology which means that dry pasta lines are handled gently with a minimum amount of noise and fresh pasta can flow easily and smoothly with no sticking to the machinery.
Meat
Get the right packaging for your meat products and customers will be drawn to them when they’re shopping. Specially designed trays, thermo seals and X-ray inspection will all help to ensure your products are packaged attractively and safely.
Fish and seafood
Hygiene is all-important when it comes to preparing, producing and packaging fish and seafood. It’s all about understanding the complexities of this specific type of food, such as speedy packaging for stickier products and low temperature working.
Great advances are regularly being made with food packaging machinery. A wide range of automated weighing and packaging solutions are available in the market to be used by various industries. The suppliers of such equipments design and build snack food bag makers, multihead weighers, checkweighers, fresh food weighers, quality control systems, x-ray inspection systems, tray sealers. There is also software for integrating them with various equipments. Apart from these the leading suppliers in this industry also produce tray denesters, conveyors, gantries and different other equipments that are of great help in enabling the overall weighing and packaging systems perform smoothly and reliably. One of the top companies such as Ishida Europe is offering solutions to companies within the food industry, offering a range of weighing, packaging and production opportunities.
Della has written about the food packaging industry for many years. She researches companies such as Ishida Europe to keep up to speed with developments within the industry.
