The Challenge
A food packaging company approached Wrabacon looking to expand with a new product line. The new product would be filled into a container, which would then need to be sealed with a lid. If this process were to be done manually, this line would require four or five employees tediously sealing the containers by hand, over and over, just to meet demand.
Further complicating the process was the fact that the company had multiple container and lid sizes for the new product, and any automated system would need to easily shift between these different options without making mistakes.
The Solution
To solve this company’s problem, Wrabacon was able to custom design and manufacture a lid denester and lidding system, which could be be used to place lids onto filled containers at the rate of 60 per minute.
Here’s how it works: There are two styles of lids that fit the containers, and operators manually load the desired lid style into a 4 hopper denester. The denester can denest up to four lids at a time, and it places them onto a short modular plastic belt conveyor. This conveyor has a short tip down section to match the angle of the lidding chute. This helps prevent jamming from the conveyor to the lid chute. The lids are then accumulated in the lid chute.
At this point, a sensor tells the denester when to denest more trays. After the lids have arrived in the lid chute, the containers travel underneath and pull the lid from the chute and under a roller section to snap the lid onto the container. This roller section has clamps that can be loosened to adjust its height, which makes it able to lid the desired product size. After the first container passes through, the next container will then travel under, and the process repeats. The containers are then transferred downstream for further processing.