Pickled fruit manufacturer cuts set up times

Established in 1880, Bennett Opie is a private, family-owned business based in Sittingbourne, Kent. It manufactures a range of products, including pickled walnuts, cocktail cherries, lemon slices and luxury bottled fruit such as pears and peaches, as well as organic sauces. Most products are packed into vacuum-tight jars with metal lids. There are three main filling lines at the Sittingbourne plant, which between them run continuously for 10 hours a day, 4 to 5 days per week. Empty jars are fed into each line, where they first pass through a jar cleaning station. Next, the jars are fed to a spice dosing system (if the product requires this) and then through a solids filler, where the jars are filled at high speed with fruits or other solid foods. The jars are filled with a liquid preservative, then transferred to a metal detector system that checks each jar for traces of metal. Towards the end of the line, a metal lid is screwed onto each jar. The final stage involves each jar lid passing through a vacuum integrity check or "dud detector" (pictured), which is performed by a non-contact eddy current measurement system from Micro-Epsilon, installed on each of the three filling lines. James Jennings, engineering manager at the plant comments: "Each filling line at the plant processes up to 150 jars per minute. We manufacture in relatively small batches for all major supermarket chains and specialist retail outlets and so typically we need to changeover a filling line four to five times every day. Minimising set up times on the filling lines is therefore critical." A key issue with regard to set up times is the vacuum integrity check on each jar lid. This inspection is necessary to ensure that the jar is correctly sealed and that no bacteria have entered the product during production. Prior to the installation of the first two Micro-Epsilon systems back in 2005, special compressed air blasters were used to remove water from the jar lids before they could pass through the original dud detection machine. This machine used optical sensors to check the tightness of the jar lids. However, the machine could not measure accurately if the colour of the lid was black. As most of the lids were now black, an alternative measurement solution that could handle up to 200 jars per minute was needed. At that time, Bennett Opie installed two Micro-Epsilon systems and a few weeks ago, a third was installed. "In terms of payback, I would say that we've achieved this already," Jennings says. "For example, since installing the new dud detectors, we've reduced set up times on each filling line significantly. Our original dud detectors took around 10 to 15 minutes to set up, whereas the new systems take four minutes, a reduction of at least 60 per cent."