In partnership with its customer Maple Leaf Foods, one of Canada’s leading prepared meat and poultry producers, Ishida Europe has played a key role in the establishment of Maple Leaf Foods’ recently opened C$772 million poultry processing plant in London, Ontario.
The plant features 12 Ishida Flex Grader systems and four Ishida RobotGraders, working in conjunction with four Ishida IX-G2 X-ray inspection systems. The Ishida equipment handles and packs all the cut-up components from the 27,500 birds processed every hour, delivering around 270,000 retail trays each day across the 16 grading and packing lines.
Nevertheless, according to Maple Leaf Foods’ Taimur Aslam, who directed the entire new factory building project, alongside the excellent performance of the Ishida machines, what has made this such a successful and stand-out project has been the high levels of collaboration and consistently exemplary service and support delivered by Ishida.
He said: “I can safely say that I have never experienced this level of collaboration from a company throughout such a huge flagship project. With Ishida I have enjoyed one of the best working relationships, a true partnership where we co-operated fully and at the same time challenged each other at every stage. This made it easy for us to push the boundaries of what we could achieve.”
A major requirement for the grading and packing lines was to reduce what had previously been a very labour-intensive manual operation to maximise speeds and efficiencies and deliver higher volumes at faster rates.
The Ishida equipment adapts to real life production scenarios, enabling the machines to handle a wide variety of packaging formats simultaneously. As a minimum, each production line can produce to tray pack, bulk pack (5kg or 20kg) or combo bulk (500kg) in unison.
Importantly, the intuitive operation of the equipment has been matched to the look and feel of other equipment on the line, including a line control system that integrates with Maple Leaf Foods’ order management systems. This means that operators can easily be moved around the factory as required. The ergonomic design of the Ishida graders was also essential to support Maple Leaf Foods’ commitment to the highest standards of health and safety.
The Ishida Flex Graders grade product to fixed weight, fixed pieces count, or a combination of both. At Maple Leaf Foods, they are grading and packing whole legs at 120 pieces per minute, and thighs and drums at up to 400 pieces per minute.
The Ishida RobotGraders combine weighing and pick-and-place technologies to grade the chicken fillets of varying weights and pack them at a fixed number of pieces per pack directly into trays at high speeds, as well as fixed weight bulk packaging and combo bulk grading. Every fillet has already passed through an Ishida IX-G2-4027-F X-ray inspection system, whose advanced dual energy technology is able to identify low density foreign bodies including bone fragments, to allow efficient rework of contaminated fillets.
“We are delighted with the performance of the Ishida equipment, which delivers what we require in terms of efficiency, throughput and reliability to enable us to increase capacity and respond quickly to market demands,” concluded Taimur.