Ishida’s ability to provide bespoke solutions for meat and poultry packing – from individual machines to the design and installation of complete lines – will be showcased on the company’s stand (C11 in Hall 11.0) at this year’s IFFA.

Ishida harnesses well over 30 years’ expertise in protein packing solutions in the ongoing design and development of equipment that enables manufacturers and processors to automate production and reduce reliance on manual labour. This helps to drive up efficiencies, increase yield and throughput, and reduce waste.

The stand will feature two recently launched Ishida models – its next generation X-ray inspection system, the IX-G2-F, which offers significantly enhanced sensitivities for the detection of low-density and difficult to spot foreign bodies such as bone; and the QX-900-Flex compact, high performance tray sealer that maximises output, capacity and flexibility for medium to high volume production lines within a compact footprint.

Also on display will be the company’s proven RobotGrader, which uses pick and place technologies to grade products of varying piece weight and place them into a fixed weight pack into crates for further processing or bulk packing.

Completing the line-up will be two models from Ishida’s extensive multihead weigher ranges – the CCW-R2-106 Fresh Food Weigher and the CCW-RV-214 Screw Feeder Weigher, both of which offer a number of features which meet the particular challenges of weighing and packing fresh and sticky protein.

The Ishida IX-G2-F incorporates a new line sensor that provides a high-quality X-ray image through an enhanced signal to noise ratio, which has an increased capability to detect bone fragments by a factor of four compared with previous X-ray models. This further enhances the ability of the machine to identify contaminants, in particular when handling thicker and denser products such as chicken fillets, chicken breasts and a wide range of poultry products where they can often be overlapped or presented with uneven surfaces.

The QX-900 offers high-speed, high-quality sealing of trays at up to 15 cycles per minute. It is capable of both seal only and MAP (Modified Atmosphere Packaging) trays and can handle a wide variety of materials and formats, including trays made from recycled or renewable cardboard and mono plastics, and the latest skinpack and skin on board variants. This supports retail and consumer demands for solutions that provide extended shelf-life to reduce food waste, while also ensuring minimal impact from packaging materials.

The unique design of the RobotGrader improves yields and efficiencies in the packing of fresh protein, reducing giveaway to less than 1% per pack. It correctly places and orientates product at speeds of up to 320 pieces per minute, depending on the number of robot heads. By comparison, a manual operation can be highly labour intensive with a single operator only able to pack 30 pieces/min, while overfill can be anywhere from 5% to up to 20%.

The 6-head Ishida CCW-R2-106 Fresh Food Weigher is designed for all types of fresh sticky products and smaller production batches. Product is delivered by a conveyor belt to the top of the weigher, where one or two operators then evenly distribute it via belt feeders to the weigh hoppers. This helps to maximise the speed and efficiency of the weighing process, while features such as scraper hopper doors, ribbed surfaces and scraper gates on the collection belt conveyors minimise product sticking.

The CCW-RV-214-SF, Ishida’s revolutionary screw feeder weigher, has enabled the fully automated handling of sticky fresh products. The technology, which uses rotating corkscrews to provide a powerful, controlled and fully automatic product feed to the hoppers, can easily double packing speeds for the stickiest applications and significantly reduce giveaway.