Recipe formulation for vitaminic drink

Recipe formulation for vitaminic drink (USA)

Theindustry of supplemented, vitaminic and energy drinks is growing rapidly. Theproduction of such formulae requires speed, volume and accuracy. Some productsweights will be in the 100s of kgs, some will be few kgs, and recipes cancontain up to 30+ ingredients. That means the installation must be designed to meterabout a 100 doses per hour, for a 3 batches hourly production. It is criticalfor this industry that automation takes care of the dosing to ensure repeatability,traceability and accuracy. Automation allows the reduction of labor to ensurecompetitiveness.Traditional systems will include rollerconveyors to move batch container from a dosing step to another, where productwill be metered on a Loss In Weight basis. Output of this configuration is high(there can be simultaneous dosing at each and every stop) but it is unusualthat plants will demand such volume. The drawbacks are in turn numerous: High initialinvestment cost, no flexibility (there is only one route – dosing system istypically designed for a defined range of products – a range of weighments),low reliability (if one section of the entire installation is down, the wholesystem stops).

Industry4.0 has brought some new avenues to automation, process safety andtraceability, and more importantly agility. Combining SoliValve® dosingequipment with automated handling systems is the way forward. The speed atwhich robots and AGV are moving equipment will allow to reduce the number ofdosing heads for a similar output. As the SoliValve® is a subtraction dosingsystem (it means that the powder that is not part of the dose remains in thestorage container), the same dosing unit will be able to meter severalcomponents into a buffer hopper, whilst the batch container is collecting otherpre-dosed materials. The robot is connected to the ERP which knows in real timethe level of product in each raw material containers. Therefore the almostempty containers can be taken away from the storage location and sent forfilling. An operator takes the container, scan the bar code and ERP willinstruct how many Kg to replenish, such that there is no or a very limitedamount of unused product at the end of the campaign that need to be repacked.Again here, the versatility of the SoliValve® will ensure that materials can bedosed, rapidly and accurately not matter they flow behavior.

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