Splicing Oxygen Scavenger Rolls
Hello,
I have just started up a new automated packaging line for an RTE snack product. The pouches have an oxygen scavenger placed in them. With the machine being automated, the scavengers are on a roll and automatically cut and placed in each pouch. Currently, when I run out of scavengers I have to replace the roll which takes a few minutes and over the course of a day I lose around an hour of production time. If I could splice the scavenger rolls together I would save a lot of time and thus produce more product. The issue I have is that to splice the scavenger rolls I would need to use tape, which creates a foreign material issue. I could use food grade tape, but I am told by another source that this would still be against FDA regs.
Does anyone have any experience splicing oxygen scavenger rolls together, or something similar that is food contact?
Thank you!
Tape in your application is indeed a concern...If the sachet is in direct contact with food and has a bit of tape on it, you certainly wouldn't want the tape to un-stick from that packet and become loose material in the food!
Are you at least keeping a supply of sachet rolls close by to the machine? Just to eliminate the step of getting a new roll from a supply elsewhere each time. Some other options come to mind:
- Does the supplier of the rolls have any longer rolls available?
- Could a double-infeed for the rolls be engineered somehow? Instead of splicing, when Roll 1 runs out the machine would switch to taking from Roll 2. This gives you time to replace Roll 1's magazine while Roll 2 is still running. After Roll 2, it switches back to Roll 1 and so on.
Can you not just dispose of the "taped" packaging?
I've always tapped rolls together-with very loudly coloured tape---it reduces downtime significantly
You can purchase metal detectable tape for just this purpose
Have you tried using a metal detectable splicing tape that is designed for this purpose. Providing you have inspection equipment post your bagger operation you would be able to automatically detect and reject the bags and product that has been joined in line.
Depending on the packaging machine to some degree, it should be possible to determine which package the splice is going into and have them rejected/reworked -- possibly even being able to not fill those packages. If it is a less automated process, the colored tape others mentioned contrasting with your product should help. Even having someone visually scan a dozen packages might be less costly than the downtime -- they can note that the splice is recovered in a maintenance log or some such.
I would anticipate that the oxygen scavenger itself is already metal detectable. They use a slow acting metal salt akin to handwarmer packs.