Meat Packaged Efficiently
Vegetarian in Belgrade? A difficult matter. “You eat bread, you love meat“*: a mantra that holds true in the Serbian capital. Correspondingly a lot of meat is used in Balkan cooking. WALDNER delivered a new high-performance DOSOMAT 12.8 to one of the largest meat processors in Serbia, a regular customer. This plant processes 40 g and 75 g cups of pâté at a capacity of 20,000 units per hour.
The DOSOMAT 12.8 is a sophisticated machine that has been tested over decades and is designed to be servo-driven with a virtual shaft. All functions can be flexibly adapted to the most diverse products and packaging materials: for instance, aluminum packaging can be changed to plastic within minutes.
Minimal wear, flexible handling: qualities that give these machines a central role in meat processing. The plant often runs with three-shift operation and with minimal staffing – meeting maximum targets in terms of discharge volume and error rate. “Fail-safe operation“ and “Zero Downtime“, really concepts from the pharmaceutical industry, are increasingly discussed here when it comes to producing large volumes of cheap products with low profit margins trouble-free. The systems have to be ultra-simple to operate and maintenance work needs to be as minimal as possible – “continuous operation“ is the aim. That‘s why the relevant user level settings are locked and can only be altered by trained and appropriately qualified personnel.
With high output volumes (up to 20,000 units per hour), customers have to be able to rely on no poorly closed or even open cups entering the sterilization process. Over-metering is consciously avoided by the ultra-precise metering capacity of the DOSOMAT 12.8 – daily savings are correspondingly huge.
The developers even had one eye on the future with the initial design of these packaging systems: DOSOMATS are flexible in terms of format. That means that they designed, as standard, so that other packaging forms can be run on them. WALDNER designed the machine for the Serbian meat processor with manual cleaning. The metering system can be removed from the DOSOMATS and cleaned “near“ the machine to achieve “Cleaning in Place“ as far as possible even with this type of cleaning, without the need to dismantle all the component parts. This prevents soiling of the worktop and machine, as well as contamination of the operator and, above all, the metering process per se – it is not necessary to throw parts all together into a cleaning vessel, reducing possible damage to each other. Customers receive the same technology and detailed solutions even with similar inline DOSOMATS, capable of providing capacities of up to 100,000 units per hour.
By ralph.krauss@waldner.de
