Page 59 - Food & Drink Magazine Jan-Feb 21

CASE STUDY
Fibre King brings efficiency to Tru Blu Beverages with new palletiser
When a palletising system becomes unreliable and causes production delays, it’s time to put it out to pasture and source a new solution. Tru Blu Beverages was having issues with its palletiser and Fibre King stepped up to solve the problem.
The challenge Fibre King was tasked with was to replace an existing palletising system that had proven to be unreliable and was causing production delays. The new palletiser needed to be able to change between seven different SKUs, all with differing pallet patterns.
Fibre King brought in a CP30R Mechanical Palletiser customised to suit existing production layout and included a remote pallet dispenser.
LOCAL TALENT
Tru Blu Beverages is an Australian-owned company that has created some of the most respected brands (Pub Squash, Waterfords Mineral Water, Diet Rite, and Wicked Energy Drink). The company also packs some of Australian supermarkets’ most popular private label or generic brands. According to the company, one in six beverages
purchased by Australian consumers is made by Tru Blu Beverages.
Fibre King, also an Australian owned company, has been designing, manufacturing and installing reliable, robust and cost-effective packaging machinery to Australian manufacturers for over 70 years and was the first Australian company to offer a locally designed and manufactured end-of-line packaging solution in 1950.
Tru Blu Beverages executive director for lean manufacturing David Pryor said the company has a wide variety of palletising solutions across its business.
“Of all the solutions present, the Fibre King machines have been installed for the longest time and have provided the best all-round experience from purchase, installation, operation, and maintenance throughout the years,” he said.
THE MACHINE
A customised Fibre King CP30R Mechanical Palletiser was the solution offered to Tru Blu based on the machine’s simple, robust and easy to use design, and cost-effectiveness.
Cases arrive at the start of an inclined conveyor narrow face leading and are taken to a high-level row forming conveyor. The extended row forming conveyor is fitted with a gate and brake system for indexing cases into the machine. An actuated turner orientates one case at a time into the required format. Once collated in a row, a 90-degree overhead row pusher slides the cases over a split layer deck assembly, pallets are automatically dispensed and moved onto a lift assembly ready for loading.
Once a full layer of cases is formed, the stripper plate opens up allowing the layer to drop onto the waiting pallet. Layer by layer the pallet is formed until the desired layer count is reached. Completed pallets are then indexed out of the machine onto the gravity pallet outfeed conveyor ready for forklift removal. No full-time operator is required to operate the machine but
does require forklift assistance for delivery of empty pallets and removal of loaded pallets. Pryor said, “This new palletising solution has
increased reliability and reduced downtime as the previous machine had design limitations that inhibited efficient operation on the smaller pack sizes.”
Fibre King CEO James Windsor said there has been a shift toward robotic palletising, but it is important to consider the benefits that mechanical palletising systems can offer.
“They are a less complex solution allowing for quicker turnaround times, quick installs and commissioning times, they are also generally more compact and require less technical maintenance reducing downtime,” Windsor said.
“Mechanical palletisers are ideally suited to one production line which runs multiple products individually throughout the course of the day.”
The new mechanical palletiser is more reliable than the company’s previous machine.
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