Cups!
by Jared Stumpenhorst
If you have ever bought a cup of microwaveable mac & cheese, oatmeal or soup and wondered how it was packaged, you can stop wondering! That is be- cause in March the Packaging Division added a microwaveable cup pack- aging line to our operation. This is a project that has been in development for well over a year, and we are very excited to finally see all of the effort paying off.
Sally Heather & Felicia Mon
The line consists of equipment that is new to Crest Foods as well as some that is a new take on equipment that we are already familiar with. The “heart” of the line is the two filler systems and the cup sealing equipment. The seal- ing equipment is a series of four lanes of cups that travel underneath two fill stations. One of the fill stations is a volumetric cup filler and the other is a quad auger. Although very similar to many of the auger fillers in our opera- tion the quad auger is unique in that there are four augers contained within a shared hopper which allows us to fill the four cup lanes in a relatively small footprint. The cup sealing equipment itself is a completely new type of equipment for Crest Foods. As mentioned there are four lanes of cups that travel along the sealer. After the cups are filled with product a film membrane is adhered to the cup. The machine makes a die cut the shape the film needs to be and then through a combination of heat and pressure the film is sealed to the cup. This seal ensures a quality product that does not spill out before it gets to the consumer. After that the cups go through standard processes of being check weighed, metal detected and coded. Over the first couple months of running, we have been extremely pleased with how the start-up has gone.
We have cycled through four different families of products and saw success on all of them. When we first started working on this project it looked like we would be taking a bit of a leap of faith that the volume would come later and fill this line up. Fast forward to where we are today, and the line is already booked through the end of the calendar year. We are extremely excited about the future for cups. If you have a chance and have not checked it out, stop by the next time you are in the plant.
Recently, Randy Reuter, Ingredient Division Production Manager, and David Henriksen, Quality Engineer Packaging Division, were honored by the Illinois Department of Public Health for their 20 years of service as First Responders. Each year there is an obser- vance of Emergency Medical Services Week, this year it was May 17 to 23, 2015, and Randy & David were presented with their certifi- cates at that time. Crest Foods also benefits from their years of experience with their participation as part of our Emergency Re sponse Team. We wish to congratulate them on this accomplishment and thank them for their service to our employees! 20 Year First Responders
David Henrikson & Randy Reuter
14 Crest Ink July, August & September 2015
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