Food & Beverage Packaging

In today’s ultra competitive Food & Beverage market, even simple flaws—like a missing label or damaged package—become problems you must find before your customer does. The expectations for consistent quality demand non-stop improvement of the precision and speed of quality control. By inspecting and tracking each and every product, manufacturers fulfill two key business objectives—reducing waste and boosting productivity.

Omron meets the market needs with a comprehensive line of smart inspection and traceability solutions that combine vision, measurement, fiber-optic sensors and controls. Engineered to handle a maximum variety of applications, Omron’s solutions help you make every single item the best it can be and help you ensure vital customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Inspection

• Bottle Cap Inspection
  Inspect for damaged or missing seals or tamper bands without slowing line speeds.
• Bottle Cap Presence
  Plastic or aluminum cap presence verification in high-speed beverage bottling applications.
• Bottle Inspection - Molded Openings
  Confirm each molded bottle opening has been molded correctly to guarantee proper fit of cap and that the bottle was not deformed or damaged in the cutting or cooling process.
• Bottle Labeling Inspection
  Accurate bottle detection, label placement and label verification at full production speeds.
• Bottle Position Detection
  Bottle filling, cartoning, capping, labeling, marking and coding
• Can-End Imperfection Detection
  Inspect top and bottom of cans for dirt, metal dust and defects such as faulty shaped ends.
• Cap Placement Inspection
  Inspection of properly placed and secure bottle caps during the capping process at full production speeds. Detects missing caps, loose caps (insufficient torque), mis-threaded caps, wrong cap.
• Coating Inspection - Thin, Clear Coatings
  Inspection of clear shrink-wrap safety bands on bottle closures and confirm clear labels are present on the backing. Also for detection of clear, sugar coatings on lozenges and pills and adhesive strips applied to envelopes, boxes and diapers.
• Date/Lot Code Marking
  Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Verification (OCV) usage to inspect spacing, print quality and reading speed.
• Error Proof Date Codes
  Detect potential incorrect codes, unreadable codes, and placement of codes at high speeds.
• Fill Level Inspection
  Inspect for consistent fill levels while keeping up with high-speed filling/bottling machinery.
• Gable Top Seal Inspection
  Inspect for proper carton seal in heat or pressure sealing, in-line forming, filling, and sealing of gable-top cartons.
• Jam Detection
  Detect improper seals from product obscruction in form, fill & seal machines.
• Label Detection
  Label detection/position in packaging lines.
• Label Indexing Inspection (Gavina Coffee)
  Inspect for squared up on the flat surfaces and labels that are out of alignment on a vacuum form sealing line.
• Label Inspection
  Post application inspection for damaged, defective, missing or skewed labeling, decorating or marking.
• Label Inspection - Two-sided, Shrink Wrapped (Dannon)
  Inspect for label placement and improper carton labelling.
• OCV Inspection
  Post application inspection of date codes, lot codes, SKUs, serial numbers and other text-based codes for accuracy and readability.
• Package Content Inspection (Crackers)
  Inspect packages to confirm that each of four foil cracker packets is present in a standard carton of saltine crackers.
• Packaging - Snack Chips
  Different pack configurations are saved as recipes on the HMI, which define product numbers, pack lengths, product positions, registration mark positions, sealing temperatures loops and speed.
• Peel-off Labels
  Detect label presence, absence, proper label usage, and damage.
• Vacuum Seal Inspection
  Inspection for missing caps, consistent and properly placed jar lids and bottle caps.

Production Improvement

• Sara Lee Bakery Division — The large bun bakery operation is an older plant where little investment in new equipment takes place. Omron was able to displace Banner photoelectric sensors, Turck proximity sensors as well as temperature controllers from Honeywell and older Omron versions. Local support and problem solving led to Omron's position as solution partner for the Plant Engineer, who is also charged with Maintenance and Engineering.
  
• Morningstar Foods, now Dean Foods — automated their pillow pack machines making portion packs of salad dressings. The pillow pack has 8 bags across running a web of foil material. The machine heat-seals, perforates, cuts and separates individual packs. System was an upgrade from Omron’s C40K to CJ1M. The old program converted smoothly; only the HDM high-speed counter had to be converted separately to a block compare instruction. This is a huge advantage of working with Omron because our migration path reduces re-engineering costs and time almost to zero. Startup time with the new controller was completed in hours instead of weeks.
• American Food Processors — fully automating the conversion of fruit juices to powder for soft drink powder mixes and medical fruit powders such as grape seed. Sold whole panel containing NS10 touch screen, CJ1M with thermocouple and analog modules, running CX-Supervisor to collect data and report to touch screen. Using it to control/monitor air flows in the system, controlling pump speed based on temperature. Old way of doing this was to read manometers, write down data from the gauges then manually adjust the pumps based on readings.
• Concord Foods, a Northeast-based ice cream toppings manufacturer, purchased E5CN temperature controllers for a chocolate syrup pouch sealer and eight (8) pairs of light curtains for their powdered product lines. The customer was seeking to retrofit older Honeywell temperature controllers to achieve greater accuracy and easier setup for operators. OMA made and shipped the custom-length light curtains within three days of order receipt.
• Sara Lee Bakery Group — had two applications for temperature controllers: one for dough mixers, the other on ovens. The customer chose E5AK, 1/4 DIN size controller. The mixer controller required NEMA 4X, configuration software, the ability to use a JPT100 or Thermocouple inputs, and needed both relay and 4-20mA analog outputs. Omron helped the customer bring a project that was running behind schedule to completion on time.