10 KIWI PACKAGING LINES

OUR CUSTOMER:
SUN PACIFIC

Sun Pacific is a California grower, harvester, and has been a packing leader of citrus since 1969. As of today they are the biggest grower of citrus and kiwi in all of North America: with 30,000 acres of land and more than 75 million packs per year, Sun Pacific provides 50% of the kiwis produced in the United States.

THE NEED

The company needed to automate the manual packaging process of their Mighties™ kiwis into clamshells of different formats. The goal was to take them to the next level as the leading kiwi packer in the United States.

THE SOLUTION

Our Italian partners, REV, designed and developed a complete packaging line tailor made to Sun Pacific’s needs that have made their weighing and filling operation fully automated, along with the ability to easily change and modify clamshell formats. In the past, modifying clamshells and changeovers had been a tedious task that dealt with prolonged pauses in production. REV’s clamshell equipment systems have been able to minimize the time in changeovers.

The packaging line for Sun Pacific is made up of 10 lines; each one is made up by:

  • The Bison weighing machine, extremely fast and gentle
  • U5-203 clamshell denester-filler, with a capability to simultaneously dose 5 clamshells
  • Click clamshell closing machine, with a capability to close 5 clamshells each cycle (this machine was designed specifically for Sun Pacific)
  • Cbox checkweigher, verifying that each weight of the clamshell is accurate

Currently, this line runs production at 40-45 clamshells per minute (2,700 per hour) and is being overseen and serviced by us here in the Central Valley.

The packaging lines are integrated into a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system, allowing real-time control of the entire plant production, thus helping to reduce machinery down-time and verify production figures.

BENEFITS

With the REV lines running at 40-45 clamshells / min, Sun Pacific reached some important targets:

  • An increase in production by 100%, with the same number of operators (40-45 clamshells / minute VS. 5 clamshells / minute through hand-packing)
  • Production costs; manpower and hand-packing were reduced by over 50%.

Why Rev

REV provides innovative solutions for packing fruit and vegetables, automation processes carried out manually. As mentioned above, our clients have experienced the efficiency along with performance and sustainability of our machines.

AND WHY MAINLINE

We take pride in our excellent service and make sure to see our projects through. The selection of machinery we offer is made with the produce industry specifically in mind because Agriculture is what we’ve grown up knowing. We see the need in produce communities and we work hard to fill it every day.

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