HOW AUTOMATION IS USED WITH TEMPERATURE CONTROLLED PACKAGING
Equipment
The equipment that is used to automate temperature-controlled packaging plays a very important role in ensuring that your precious products don’t go bad during transit from your distribution location to your customer. One important role that automated technology takes on when dealing with packaging that is temperature sensitive is the process of coding. When one references coding in packaging, they are talking of the process of stamping on any imperative information that your customer must know about the product onto either the product itself, or onto the packaging that houses it. These codes could be expiration dates for perishable products, or they could contain information that is necessary for keeping track of the product both for the sake of the customer and the company shipping the product. These codes can also list when the product was packaged either in the MM/DD/YY format, or they can even be as accurate as to list the hour they were packaged. Automated equipment can fast track this process quite easily. Typically, automated machinery working a job like this will make use of continuous ink jetting. Basically, machines will be constantly shooting electrically charged ink drops through an electric field that allows them to be precisely printed onto packaging in the most accurate and efficient way possible. The functionality that machine automation brings to temperature-controlled packaging doesn’t end here, however.
Testing Services
Automated equipment can provide testing capabilities that help your business determine when a product may expire. Knowing the time that a product will expire is extremely important to any business. If it’s a food related item, then knowing when something will expire, and putting a code on it to indicate this expiration date, is essential to keeping your business afloat. Not knowing the expiration date of your products can be potentially harmful to your customer and create unwanted liability. This process is also important for the sake of helping you identify a qualified time window to ensure your product stays fresh during transit and/or shipping. Automated machinery can give accurate expiration windows for most products that have to deal with such a process, and the peace of mind that they bring alone is priceless.
Common Equipment Used
We started to talk about some of the more common pieces of automation in use in the testing services section above, but we didn’t get into some of the more specific tasks that other machines can perform. One machine that is used not only with temperature-controlled packaging, but with all packaging is the semi auto case sealer. This is an operator-aided machine that specializes in producing sealed boxes very quickly. The machine operates by applying tape and sealing loaded packages. The output that the machine can manage is extremely high when compared to an operation that isn’t making use of automated machinery. Because the machine is designed to perform each job with precision, you will find that less packaging and product is wasted by human error, and each package will be uniformly sealed. The next piece of equipment that is very common in this field is a type of automated labeler. Labeling is the process of putting labels on the products themselves that indicate what the product is, the expiration date of it, and, in the case of food packaging, the nutritional facts regarding the item. Obviously, labels are extremely important in the function that they serve, and with automated machinery your labels will never be crooked or falling off. The labeler runs off of a print and apply system, meaning it will both print the product label and then apply it on to the given product. If your company happens to be making use of RFC cases, then the labeler can automatically put a label on the outside of the product with all of the relevant time stamp information associated with it. These are some of the most common pieces of equipment that are employed in this industry, but there is still one more piece of the puzzle to cover, what insulation is typically used with temperature-controlled packages?
Common Insulation Used
The insulation that is commonly used with packaging that is intended to maintain a certain temperature has actually undergone a number of changes over the years to accommodate the changing world. Formerly, styrofoam was most often used as insulation for packaging that had temperature-related needs. It was very effective for what it needed to do, but foam is incredibly harmful to the environment, and, thus, it has slowly been worked out of circulation in the packaging industry. Nowadays, many companies make use of a blended cotton material to insulate their packages. This material is just as insulating as foam and is much better for the environment as it’s biodegradable. The only real issue that some companies have with the switch is that foam is incredibly cheap, and it does its job well, so it’s hard for them to justify switching merely for the environment. However, many people would opt out of using products that have anything to do with foam in the current day. For the sake of both the reputation of the company, and for the planet, many businesses have made the eco-friendly shift to the blended cotton material for insulation. Reducing the amount of waste on the planet easily outweighs any monetary benefit that could come from using foam, and it’ll make any company look better for not making use of the damaging material.
How Morrisette Can Help You
Morrisette is a supplier of automation equipment that is built to make your operation run more efficiently. Whether that comes in the form of optimizing the parts of your workplace that may be lacking in output, or fully modernizing your operation to accommodate higher volumes of work, Morrisette offers a variety of solutions that will only improve your business. Our team of in-house engineers will work with any business to improve its output and efficiency and we are fully prepared to provide custom solutions and plans to improve your business. If you are looking for ways to improve your work operation, contact us and we’ll work with you to find an automated packaging solution that works for you.