There is no doubt that vertical bagging equipment can boost the sustainability of many businesses by lowering labor and material costs. But how can you be sure vertical bagging is the best option for your products, and how do you choose the best vertical bagger for your business?
Products That Benefit From Vertical Bagging
Coffee, snack foods, rice, cereal, and candy are just some of the many products packaged with vertical bagging equipment. If you currently package your products in premade bags, upgrading your packaging operation with a vertical bagger will give you both a lower material cost per bag and lower labor costs on your packaging line. You can also package significantly faster than with most manual or semiautomatic processes, saving you time and giving you room for future production growth.
Vertical bagging isn’t just for food anymore either. Many medical products, like asthma inhalers and pipet tips, are packaged on vertical baggers, often as a sterile, low-cost replacement for cartoning. Powders, granular products, liquids, and small pieces that can be dosed by weight or count are all suitable for being packaged on a vertical bagger.
How Vertical Bagging Equipment Works
If you’re just launching a new product or converting your packaging over from premade bags, it’s helpful to understand how a package is made and filled on a vertical bagger. The packaging starts as a flat film on a roll. The inner layer of the film will seal to itself when heat and pressure are applied, and the outer layer is preprinted with your logo, graphics, and other package content, like nutritional information. If you don’t currently have a film supplier, Technik is happy to connect you with a trusted partner we’ve worked with in the past to source your film.
The vertical bagger unwinds this film from a roll and passes it through a carriage, where optional equipment such as printers or label applicators can apply information that’s unique to each package, such as a code date or lot number. The film is then pulled down around a collar that wraps it around the outside of a forming tube, and heat seal tooling on the front of the tube seals the vertical edge of the film to itself. At the bottom of the tube, horizontal heat sealing jaws create a cross seal across the bag.
On top of the machine, a weigher, auger, liquid pump, or other appropriate dispensing device doses the correct quantity of product. The dosing device can be filled by overhead equipment, or by optional elevating systems from floor level. When the bagger is ready to fill a bag, a control signal automatically calls for the desired quantity of product to be dosed down the forming tube.
Once the product has been dispensed, the machine advances the film down the forming tube until the correct bag length has been reached. The horizontal jaws then close again, forming the top of the filled bag as well as the bottom of the next bag to be filled, and a knife in the middle of the jaws cuts off the finished bag, which drops down a discharge chute for further handling. Optional conveying or secondary packaging can be automated as well.
Which Bagger To Choose
The first step in the process is to determine your own needs. You’ll want to decide what bag style you want, the bag dimensions, product fill weight, count, or volume, and required output speed. Technik is happy to help advise and consult on these aspects of the project to ensure the result meets all your requirements.
Many applications also have special requirements, such as recloseable features, printing and/or labeling, or secondary packaging like automatically loading bags into shipping cases. Please let Technik know if you have any such requirements. Your sales engineer may also offer options that provide advantages for your specific application or are common with similar products and packages.
At Technik, we offer vertical baggers and other packaging equipment with performance, quality, and reliability that matches the most premium equipment in the industry, at a far lower cost. Our vertical baggers incorporate the latest automation controls and operator interfaces from industry leaders like Allen-Bradley and Siemens. We also use widely available off-the-shelf components like Festo pneumatics and Sick sensors to enhance reliability and lower maintenance time and cost.
Vertical Bagging Equipment From Technik Packaging Machinery
Our website has descriptions, pictures, and video of each of the standard vertical bagger models we offer, but each machine is built to the requirements of a specific application. The best way to learn about your options is to contact Technik today. One of our sales engineers will review your application with you and create a proposal for a vertical bagger that’s precisely suited to your specific requirements.
Our team has decades of combined experience with almost every type of product and package that a vertical bagger can automate The sooner we can evaluate your needs, the sooner you can be impressing your customers with higher output, lower costs, and better package quality, so please call or email us today and we can get started!
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