Egg producer Bird Bros has succeeded in overcoming downtime, increasing efficiency and eliminating wastage by upgrading to a fully automatic Endoline case sealing system.
Based in Bedfordshire, the company supplies high quality eggs to independent retailers, food service companies and wholesalers. It has a weekly production of 3 million eggs and 20% of its eggs are supermarket branded.
Bird Bros' farm uses an automated packing line to grade and pack eggs into egg boxes before being placed into a case and transported via a long conveyor through a case sealer for palletising.
The company supplies the eggs in 15 different case sizes, depending on the requirements of its customers.
However, till now it was using equipment that was producing 12-15 cases per minute which was leading to production bottlenecks.
Bird Bros director Matthew Bird said: "The efficiency of our production line and pack presentation was compromised as the semi-automatic system was pushed to its maximum capacity.
"Busy periods would lead to a backlog of boxes and the case sealing system was unable to process the boxes gradually resulting in boxes being crushed and eggs being damaged - as a result at least 25 cases filled with eggs were wasted each week."
Owing to this limitation, the company installed Endoline's 734 fully automatic random case sealer that features a bar code reader to identify the bar codes on individual cases at a maximum speed of 20 cases per minute.
Endoline's sales and marketing manager Andrew Yates said: "The 734 has gated infeed spacing controls. A blade stop is automatically activated after a case passes the barcode reader to ensure that a second case doesn't enter the sealing area. This will police the throughput of cases to ensure there is a suitable gap between them and ensures a consistent flow of cases into the machine"
With the new machine, the company can now pass 5000 boxes through the sealer every day and its wastage is now down to under 0.1%.
"We have been able to upskill two workers who were previously permanently working on the line and I no longer have to run out every half hour to deal with too many boxes coming down the line which was damaging our produce. With the 734 in place the operation is more efficient and smooth," added Bird.
