Stand-Up Pouch small-scale processing
Hello,
My company is pursuing a change towards compostable stand-up pouches for our products (capsules/powders). We are a very small company and most of our packaging/bottling process is manual. Currently, plastic or glass bottles are placed under a pill counter by hand, where they are then sealed by hand as well.
Stand-up pouches add the challenge of quickly opening them up and standing the upright underneath the pill counter. Fiddling with the pouch to get it open takes a few seconds more than simply grabbing a bottle. The pouches are so light when empty that they can be difficult to stand up unless the bottom gusset is fully expanded. The seconds lost to mess with these pouches translates to significant drops in production capacity when extrapolated across an entire shift.
My question is, does anyone know of any solutions to quickly opening/filling these pouches in a low-budget, manual setting? It has been difficult to find tools suited for this purpose. I can think of some improvised setup that may work...but I'm certain that we're not the first small company to work with these kinds of pouches. Does anyone have any experience?
Thank you!
Can you add one extra person for opening the bags?
In my previous company, we used to pack croutons, it was all manual.. one person used to open the bag, other quickly putting underneath the dispenser and filling, then it runs on the conveyor for seal and date code/BB, finally third person packing in the box.
do you have same set up?
Thanks
Hi Namishka,
Unfortunately adding another person is not an option for us. One person runs each filling machine, right now they take the bottle out of the box and place it under the filling machine. Afterwards they take the filled bottle and screw a cap onto it. Since we'd like to move to bags, we're looking for a solution to make opening the bags before placing them under the machine quicker.
Are you using top or bottom filled bags?
Hi Scampi, we are using top-filled bags. The bags are stood-up underneath the capsule counter for filling, after which they are moved by hand to a neighboring sealer.
Probably the easiest way is with a puff of air
here's a couple of links
https://quickpouch.c...mple to operate.
https://sencorpwhite...ickpouch-micro/
Very cool Scampi! The company you linked offers some interesting solutions. Info like this puts me on the right track to better understand what's out there. I agree with the air puff solution, thinking we could rig something up where an operator puts a pouch against a nozzle of compressed air to quickly puff it up.