Clean and safe bulk handling for biscuits

When an iconic Australian food company needed a new method of reliable, continuous supply of snack biscuits to its high-speed weighers and feeders for packaging, it sought the assistance of two Australian manufacturing companies. Kiel Industries and Pro Ali Design collaborated on the project to design and build a new production line for the snack biscuit manufacturer.

Kiel Industries supplies the largest range of plastic pallets in the Southern Hemisphere, developing innovative designs for pallets, bins and ancillary products. Pro Ali Design provides conveying solutions for many of Australasia’s leading food manufacturers.

A major requirement of the biscuit packaging line was to replace the existing bins and handling system with a line that used a cleaner, more versatile bin.

Colin Kiel, managing director of Kiel Industries, explained: “For the production line, ‘cleaner’ meant that the bins had to empty completely, with no residual biscuits being trapped by corners or edges.”

The biscuit production process involves several basic steps. Pastry is made and spread before the topping is added and then cut to shape and baked. Once through the ovens, the snack biscuits are placed into the Kiel-designed plastic storage and transport bins in large plastic bags. When the biscuits are ready for packing, the bins are moved and the biscuits decanted to portion pack sizes of 25 and 70 g. Portion packs are retained in the bins until bin emptying is required to create multipacks on the packaging line. The portion packs are then boxed, ready to be sent out to supermarkets across the country.

The customer requirements were for 650 L, food-grade polyethylene bins that were standard pallet-sized with smooth walls and were easy to clean. The bins also needed the capability to be safely stacked up to eight high.

The biscuit manufacturer ensures the freshness of its product by insisting on a 14-day turnaround between baking and packaging. During this two-week period, approximately 1000 bins of snack biscuits are produced. To meet this demand and ensure there were always sufficient bins, Kiel Industries manufactured 1500 bins in total.

Some of the 650-litre bins manufactured by Kiel Industries for a biscuit manufacturer.

Once the design of the bin had been confirmed, prototypes were sent to Pro Ali Design for the development of the automated tipping machinery that was to be part of the new production line. It was a change in process for Kiel to develop a bin and have the handling equipment built for it. “Usually a company designs and builds a processing plant, and then asks us to give them a bin that fits their system,” said Kiel.

According to Jon Ball, Pro Ali’s business development manager, his company received a very specific brief from the biscuit manufacturer for the development of its new production line. The main requirement was to improve efficiencies and remove the need to manually load biscuits from different-shaped bins.

The cubic-metre bins developed by Kiel Industries had to be robust enough to withstand being picked up and moved around in areas where there were multiple forklifts operating, so the Pro Ali design incorporated a heavy-duty bin tipper.

The ‘lift and tilt’ mechanism from Pro Ali Design that empties the Kiel Industries’ bins onto the production line.

“We were working with very fragile product in both the contents and the packaging,” said Ball. “The consumer packs are highly decorated, so cannot be scuffed during transport along the line.” The packaging line includes elevated and radius conveyors, so Ball had to ensure that there were minimal junctions, bends, lips and edges in the line on which packets of biscuits could be caught.

The feeder hoppers all include a laser level, which sends an alert when the biscuit level is low and requests that another bin be decanted into the packaging line. The line has four units operating on a continual basis to ensure that it is conveying a regular, constant stream of product.

The processing line design incorporates a number of safety features to protect workers, including light curtain safety lockouts. “Safety was paramount, and our design had to reflect this,” Ball added. “When the beam of one of the light curtains is broken, the system shuts down and must be manually reset in order to start the process again.”

One feature of the project was that the new production line was to be built on a blank floor area dedicated to the bin tippers and conveyor system — not around or over existing machinery, as is often the case. “This allowed us to have a lot of straight runs to ensure nothing gets stranded high up on an elevated section,” Ball said. “In the past, it was possible to get the contents of different packs mixed because some got caught at a junction and dislodged on a later run.”