In the past few years, due to strong demand for clinically validated and popular products, single 30g/bag powdered dietary alternatives have been rapidly shipped from Medifast's headquarters factory to customers. Therefore, Owings Mills added two new horizontal form/filling/sealing fully automatic packaging production lines in December 2014.

Powder meal substitute packaging production line

At the front end of the entire line, filling accuracy is crucial. The powder we fill is expensive, so production is crucial, "said Ron Marburger, Engineering Manager Operations and Supply Chain.

Although the bagging system and carton conveyor line are on two separate lines, the difference between bagging and boxing is huge: the company uses a continuous moving triangular robot system that uses vacuum suction cups to transport, taking out two flat bags from the conveyor and neatly stacking them in a seven story sorting bucket on top of the incoming cartons. Once the two buckets have complete bags, they move towards the paper box direction and the two new buckets move into place. At the same time, the entire bucket detects the cardboard box, allowing the seven listed bags to be pushed into one cardboard box.

What makes this high-speed robot transfer even more interesting is that the tool at the end of the robot arm rotates each bag. Marburg explained the reason. Powder often accumulates at the bottom of the bag, so you have a thicker bottom and a very thin top. If you stack seven layers like this, the seven layer material of the palletizing machine will be very unstable, which naturally leads to handling problems and frequent blockages on the paper box. By alternating bags in this way, we have a more uniform, repeatable, and stable stacking.

The robot picking system and the robot itself are controlled by a five axis motion logic control platform, which is similar to the controller that controls the upstream eight axis mail bag. This control platform provides all the motion and robot control capabilities, where the robot "knows" exactly where to go in the air and needs to pick a bag each time - even if the bag is a moving target. This is also an important breakthrough and highlight in the packaging part of the fully automatic packaging production line for powdered meal substitutes, including 30g/bag, and even the heavy-duty powder packaging production line.