High Speed Sauce Handling Line

In 2002, we completed our first high speed sauce bottling line at Premier Foods, Bury St Edmunds [formerly Haywards].

The line, which operated at speeds in exces of 300cpm, on a wide range of HDPE bottles and glass jars, was designed, installed and commissioned by Planet engineers, using equipment from specialist suppliers throughout Europe.

At the beginning of the line was a high speed bottle unscrambler and orientator, which fed the bottles onto a vacuum conveyor, which in turn fed them to the combination rinser/filler/capper tri-block.

This unit is one of the biggest of its type so far manufactured and gives the containers a thorough air cleaning before hot or cold filling the range of sauces that Premier produce.

Using a special transfer device after filling, the bottles or jars are either capped on the integrated capping system or bypass to a twist off capper further down the line.

After metal detection and induction sealing, the containers were fed to a flat bed overspray cooler.  This is one of the first times that we had used sophisticated decelerating conveyor to feed these difficult to handle unstable containers onto the belt of the cooler.  At the discharge end a series of accelerating belts led to a pressureless single filing unit.

Bottles then pass through a blower unit before being labelled and shrink-wrapped.  At the end of the line a fully automatic palletizer stacked the finished product, ready to be taken away by the waiting forklift truck.

The design of the system was made as flexible as possible, so that fast changeover could be carried out on both containers and product, which can vary from tomato ketchup to brown sauce and salad cream.

The line illustrates Planet Flowline’s ability to combine the resources of the various suppliers to produce a state-of-the-art packaging line.