Automatic horizontal form-fill-seal packaging system keeps business from going to seed

摘要

Since before 1992 Performance Seed Co.'s St. Could, Minn., plant used four bag-packing lines to keep up with their bird and lawn seed packing business. The lines included three automatic vertical form-fill-seal packaging systems and one manual packaging systems. Performance Seed needed to fill bags of several sizes, and its vertical form-fill-seal systems couldn't fill bags over 5 pounds. The larger the bag, the taller a vertical system had to be, and the plant didn't have the headroom to accommodate taller equipment. Because the vertical systems couldn't handle large bags, the company was forced to manually package them.The company needed three or four workers to run the manual packaging system. Using premade bags, an operator hung a bag on a spout located on the system's scale. The seed was gravity-fed from a hopper to the bag on the scale, where the seed was weighed according to the bag size being filled.