When country singing legend george jones wanted to manufacture his own recipe of breakfast sausage, he turned to tennessee pork sausage processor williams sausage to make it for him. &ldquoi wouldn&rsquot put my name on anything that wasn&rsquot the best,&rdquo says jones. &ldquoand williams sausage makes some of the best i have ever had.&rdquo with 400,000 lb of whole hog country pork sausages coming out of its west tennessee processing plant every week, george jones is just one of many consumers that are drawn to the williams sausage brand.
To satisfy this huge market demand, the company&rsquos pork sausage patties, links, and chubs are distributed to retail outlets and institutions throughout the eastern and central u.s. Williams sausage added to its product offerings by launching a line of readytoeat breakfast sausage sandwiches. Packaged products like williams express sausage, egg and cheese croissants have necessitated the redesign and integration of two of the company&rsquos packaging lines. The upgrade centered on a more streamlined and efficient shrink wrapping capability to process 100 more sandwiches through the line, while maintaining a zero productdefect rate and maximized uptime.
The line upgrade exemplifies how implementing the right equipment can deliver a costefficient and longterm return on investment. It&rsquos all about the sausage. Since 1958, when the company was founded by harold and hazel williams on their family farm in rural west tennessee near union city, williams sausage has always produced countrystyle whole hog breakfast sausage.
The company slaughters 1,200 hogs a week for its sausage. After slaughtering and deboning, the hog is ground and mixed with spices to conform to established recipes. The mixture is portioned into patties, links, and one and twopound chubs which are packaged in cartons, then cased, labeled, palletized, and put into deepfreeze storage. All of william sausage&rsquos fresh pork sausage products are stored frozen. Its deepfreeze can hold 1,200 pallet loads, which are kept in storage for one to two weeks before shipping. The company also warehouses and distributes its own line of smoked sausage and bacon, which are manufactured for it at an outsourced facility.
Sixty percent of the company&rsquos distribution is destined for institutional consumption, and 40 for retail outlet sales.williams sausage maintains its own fleet of trucks for distribution. Jammed packaging line williams sausage runs 11 packaging lines in its plant to handle different product types. Four of those lines are for packaging sausage links and chubs. Four of the lines are for packaging sausage patties. Three lines are dedicated for packaging breakfast biscuit sandwiches, of which one line handles jumbo sandwiches. The two remaining breakfast sandwich lines were redesigned to upgrade their shrink wrap packaging capability, to improve efficiency, and toaccommodate increased throughput needs.
These two sandwich lines allow for the manual &ldquoassembly&rdquo of the sausage biscuits, and their packaging. When the sandwiches are put together, the biscuits proceed through a cutter that slices them in half. The split biscuits move along a conveyor, where sausage patties are manually positioned between the two biscuit slices. These sandwiches then go through a wrapper, and the sealed biscuits are stacked into cartons. At this point the two lines merge onto one packaging line, where the cartons proceed through a shrink wrapper, are cased, labeled, and palletized.
When the sausage sandwiches were first introduced, moving 12 to 14 cartonsmin through the endofline packaging process was adequate to keep pace with production demands. But as the breakfast sandwiches&rsquo popularity grew and orders increased, it became clear that the packaging line was no longer able to support the increased throughput required. &ldquoour production volumes had significantly increased,&rdquo says tommy ray, plant manager at williams sausage. &ldquowe needed to double our packaging capability, our throughput of cartons per minute, to keep up with the demand. &ldquothe bottleneck was our shrink wrapping system.
The wrapper was only capable of handling 12 to 14 cartons per minute. But at this rate we were experiencing line interruptions and delays. We needed to have the ability to shrink wrap 24 to 28 cartons per minute to keep the sandwich manufacturing lines moving.&rdquo williams sausage brought in texwrap packaging systems, a provider of specialized shrink wrapping solutions, to engineer a shrinkwrap system that would address its throughput issues. &ldquothey were having difficulty with downtime on their shrink wrap system,&rdquo says texwrap&rsquos dan fredrick. &ldquoaside from maintenance issues caused by heavy throughput volumes, the machine was operating in a cold and damp environment, and
that was having a costly effect on the company&rsquos shrinkwrapping operations. &ldquoin a chilled, highhumidity environment, like at williams sausage where the temperature is between 32 and 39 degrees f, the cool air forms ice crystals that can build up on smooth moving machine parts, like drive belts, causing them to slip or grab,&rdquo fredrick explains. &ldquowhen this happens it affects machine registration, and the shrink wrapper will compensate for the slack registration by making a longer film bag than necessary.
Consequently, the shrink wrapper will pull unnecessary extra film, costing more money to run the process. &ldquoif the bag is too long, when it balloons in the heat tunnel it is going to balloon too big and will not collapse completely, resulting in wrinkled film and a product with poor appearance. And compensating for that big bag requires extra heat energy to be used.&rdquo williams sausage was using an lbar shrinkwrap sealer. This type of shrink wrapper simultaneously makes the end and side seal of one package, as well as the front seal of the trailing package
. It is acceptable when slowtomoderate throughput speeds are needed. Williams saw drawback to this sealer type because it requires the same size of cartons to be put through the wrapper at any continuous time, or the machine has to be stopped and a changeover done to accept a different carton size. &ldquowe have 10 different box lengths for our sandwiches,&rdquo says ray. &ldquoand we have different carton sizes depending on what we are running. We have cartons that carry six twinpacks of 12 total biscuits, eight twinpacks of 16 biscuits, and 10 twinpacks of 20 biscuits, to name a few.
The cartons are all the same width and height, but different lengths.&rdquo shrink wrapping streamlines packaging williams installed a texwrap model 2202 cr continuousmotion sideseal wrapper in which the incoming stream of product does not stop while the end seal is made, thereby increasing throughput speed. Its conveyors can move at 100 ftmin with versatile cartonhandling flexibility.the system is all stainless steel for ease of washdown.
For this boxmotionstyle wrapper, the device makes the end seal move horizontally with the product as the seal is being made. When the seal is complete, the head raises and the carriage returns to engage the next package and make the next seal.
Box motion refers to the rectangularshaped path of the sealing head. &ldquothe box seal requires a heavy carriage assembly to which the seal is mounted,&rdquo says fredrick. &ldquothe hardware that has to execute rapid movements back and forth. It has to open up, come back across the package, seal, open again, and go back and grip the next package.
This requires considerable motion for a large, heavy assembly. Instead of using just bottom bearings typical on most shrink wrappers using this method, this unit uses toprail bearings as well, double bearings. This takes the stress load off from the top and stabilizes the movements of the seal assembly. Without this feature, the carriage could not move as fast. &ldquoalso, instead of using bumpers to provide hard stops for the seal carriage, as is the norm on typical shrink wrappers, a cam and spring assembly, assisted by compressed air, is used to rotate the carriage into a soft return,&rdquo continues fredrick. &ldquothis eliminates the shaking that usually occurs on fast returns, forcing the system to pause
while the photoeyes and sensors settle out. Since there is no bounce, the carriage can return up to 15 percent faster, increasing cycle times.&rdquo to further maximize throughput speed, the wrapper is equipped with motion trim&trade technology, which electronically minimizes the motion of the endseal device. It also includes a speedmaximizer&trade system that automatically brings the machine up to top speed for any given carton size setup. Autospacing&trade is used to separate randomly spaced incoming cartons for wrapping. A photoeye is mounted above the infeed conveyor, which detects the front and rear edges of the incoming cartons and spaces them an exact distance apart for wrapping. With autospacing control, horizontal as well as vertical photoeyes, and the ability to precisely vary the conveyor speeds to relax the film between products, williams sausage&rsquo new shrinkwrapping system can accommodate randomly fed cartons and accurately separate them for reliable, consistent packaging using the absolute minimum amount of film. &ldquothe cartons are manually placed on the conveyor, and automatically indexed just before they are inducted into the shrink wrapper,&rdquo continues ray. . Httpwww.packworld.commachinerymultipackersampshrinkwrapperswilliamssausages…
