Technology at Crest Foods by Rick Rice Over the past few years, but with greater momentum lately, we have been introducing new technology into the fold at Crest Foods. Some of it you might have noticed while other changes are quiet and behind the scenes. There are plenty of new things out there in the land of technology but it doesn’t always make sense for us here at Crest. The careful balance that we try to achieve is to bring improvements that help impact our bottom line without causing such a ripple in how we do things that we hurt that same bottom line. This article outlines just two of our newest innovations. One of our latest projects, the cup filling equipment on Line 24, is one place where the innovation is helping us in ways beyond the obvious. Sure, we are filling cups at a little over 90 cups per minute with a machine that we have never used before but some of the hidden features, first tried on Line 24, will pave the road for future success. Line 24 is the first Crest-built line to include a completely plug and play connectivity. You might notice when you walk by the line that there are very few visible cables. Well the reason for this is we pre-installed connection boxes in the ceiling that provide not only the power to the various pieces of equipment but also provide connection points for an Ethernet network as well as multi-use input/output connections. The cool thing about all this is it can be disconnected from the box in the ceiling and the equipment can be moved completely out of the room without the need for technicians and tools. Line 24 is also the first place that we have used a new type of drop detect sensor that is practically unaffected by product buildup on either the lens of the sensor or the drop tube itself. This means that we have fewer stops for faulty drop detection as well has less need to maintain the clear window that we do on our existing lines. Finally, Line 24 is the first line that is capable of providing us with production status information. This is important because, in order for us to stay competitive, we need to understand how our lines are performing. Data that we can collect will give us indicators of not only if a piece of equipment is going to fail but when that might actually happen. Another project that we completed in the last year was the new blender in our mix facility. Now you might think that isn’t very special as we do have 11 other blenders in our system but, like Line 24, we have some new technology that will help lead the way to better productivity. Mixer 7 is the first blender to implement a safe-off power system. This allows us to safety prevent movement of the blender for dry-cleaning purposes without shutting down power to the whole system. How does this help? Well, in the past, when we want to clean the ribbon on a blender, we had to use a big stick, or a metal bar to physically turn the ribbon to get at all the surfaces. We did this because, with the power off, there is no way to turn the ribbon electrically. The new system will safety turn off the power to the blender from the access platform while we clean a surface and then we can close the lid, re-energize the system and by pressing a button, have the ribbon automatically turn 120-degrees to expose the next section for cleaning. When the open the lid again the power automatically shuts off to the blender and won’t turn on again until the blender lid is again closed. Mixer 7 is also the first blender to utilize a new rotary discharge valve instead of the usual slide gate style. With this technology we are able to accurately control the flow of product during a discharge into a drum or tote or, in this case, a super-sac but utilizing a trickle position on the valve where it is only opened part way. Combined with a new model of scale indicator, we were able to introduce a completely automatic discharge function on Mixer 7. By enter- ing the desired target rate and pressing a single button on the screen, the operator is able to fill a drum/tote/super- sac to within 2 pounds of desired weight. This is repeatable time and again. The system even does the math for the operator so that we have eliminated mistakes in calculations of what is actually discharged from the blender for each dump.
18 Crest Ink October, November & December 2015
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs