Benefits of Forpak’s Unique Pizza Stacking Equipment

Look at any supermarket and you’ll find at least one consistency: the sign for the frozen pizza aisle! Equipment like ours helps make that happen. For frozen, dry, and refrigerated pizzas and pizza crusts, there is a large section of the worldwide pizza production that utilizes automated equipment to sort, move, stack, and package premade crusts and pizzas. At Forpak, our engineering and fabrication teams are dedicated to creating innovative solutions for food packaging in the meat, bakery, and pizza industries. This includes our effective, high-quality, custom designs for pizza stacking equipment.

When customers see our pizza stacking equipment in action, they get a sample of just how much our machines can streamline the production line and improve quality while eliminating human error/contamination and decreasing the overall cost of the fabrication and packing process.

Forpak’s primary pizza stacking equipment leading in the food packing industry for premade pizza crusts and pizzas is our GSII Servo Stacker. This stacker is a highly flexible design capable of reducing labor costs by 30-50%.

GSII Pizza Stacking Equipment

 

  • The GSII can stack 80 pieces per minute and is suited for larger bakery products. This makes it ideal for stacking and sorting premade pizza crusts and pizzas.
  • This pizza stacking equipment meets requirements for NSF 3A Standards and the BISSC Standards for Baking, which means it’s not only efficient but also hygienic and sanitary with full wash-down capabilities.
  • Forpak GSII stackers can be calibrated with multiple recipe controls, making it possible to handle pizza products in various dimensions.
  • Our Automated Interleaving options allow production lines to incorporate cardboard or paper feeding in the stacking process, which aids in the packaging effectiveness and helps limit contamination. This also eliminates the need for manual interfeeding of paper packing materials between stacked products, speeding up production and, again, lessening human contamination factors.
  • GSII stackers are customizable to have 1-3 lanes and each machine is built with variable conveyor speeds.
  • Not only do our stackers have full wash-down capabilities, they are all built with stainless steel to prevent corrosion that will damage equipment over time and introduce unnecessary contamination factors.
  • The servo-controlled actuators that provide stacking motion are accuracy-based systems that create level and precise stacks.

 

When it comes to reducing time and costs while improving worker safety and product quality, Forpak’s GSII pizza stacking equipment is an innovative solution proven to be effective, and our food packaging equipment is one of the best in the industry. To learn more about our products, contact Forpak at (612) 419-1948 or pgoche@multisourcemfg.com. Request more information online today or request a quote to get started with us today.

Optimizing Your Designs with Value Engineering

MultiSource Manufacturing LLC has worked as a contract manufacturer since 1998 and has over 20 years of experience in a wide range of industries, from medical device fabrication to the production of semiconductor components. Our engineers work with many prototyping and production techniques to accomplish the continued precision and quality we offer OEMs and other customers. One of the foundational practices we utilize for the engineering of all our projects is “value engineering.”

Value engineering is a methodology used in many industries to design and build parts and assemblies with continued improvements to the function of the final product while limiting unnecessary costs. Using value engineering allows us to focus on the function-to-cost ratio of products and then target how that ratio can be bettered.

For all the industries we manufacture parts and assemblies for, MultiSource teams use value engineering to maintain our precision-based, industry-leading quality. One of the core parts of value engineering processes is function analysis.

 

Function Analysis

Value engineering is based on a manufacturer’s ability to analyze the function of a part or full assembly and optimize the design of that object to best fit its role. This process is called function analysis, and it can be applied to every part and assembly we manufacture. Function analysis works to first determine the function that must be filled and for how long, the design that will best perform that function, and the way to build that design in the most cost-effective way.

For example, if the function that must be performed is a connection between two components that may need to be removed at some point in its lifetime, the best design to achieve that connection may be a nut and bolt fastening system. Engineers then decide what materials and dimensions will be the most effective without compromising the project budget. The goal of value engineering and function analysis is to optimize project time, quality, and expense by determining the most effective design that can be made with the least cost.

What that means for our customers is that they can trust they will be getting the most out of their materials, costs, and time. Not only does value engineering allow our engineers to build the parts and assemblies that will fit like a glove into the necessary function, it also eliminates excess costs and streamlines the production schedule so our customers can predict their own project goals accurately.

To learn more about the process and tools of value engineering, contact MultiSource Manufacturing LLC at (952) 456-5500. Request more information, or request a quote to get started with us today.

Plastic Fabrication in the Manufacturing World Part 4: PFA

This is the fourth and final part of our blog series covering the plastics our engineers and technicians work with in the MultiSource Manufacturing LLC network. Parts 1-3 cover CPVC, PVC, and polypropylene. In this final section, we’ll talk about perfluoroalkoxy alkane (PFA), including its properties and uses in the industrial world.

Plastic fabrication is a heavily used process for a broad range of industries, and our manufacturing technicians are capable of performing multiple operations, including welding, bending, and forming. Quality plastic fabrication results require skill and precision because the process often involves a high level of understanding of the chemical reactions that happen when heat and pressure are applied to any given type of plastic. At MultiSource Manufacturing, our plastic fabrication processes are high quality, precise, and utilize comprehensive operational capabilities.

As one of the primary plastics we use in fabrication processes, PFA is a hardy polymer. Because of its extremely high resistance to harsh chemicals, PFA is an ideal plastic to use in a broad range of industrial and commercial settings.

Properties: PFA has a smaller chain length on a molecular level than many other fluoropolymers. This, in addition to an oxygen atom at its branches, make it more translucent with greater thermal stability (effective in a range of -200ºC to 260ºC). Because of this, PFA is resistant to thermal, chemical, and physical stresses. With strong stability at high temperatures, PFA has crack and stress resistance with a low coefficient of friction. PFA is also UV resistant, has antistick properties, and is molecularly stable, even when exposed to almost all other chemicals. PFA is a strong plastic that resists chemical exposure, temperature changes, and repeated bending better than almost any other fluoropolymer.

Uses: Because of its resistance to chemicals, temperature changes, and physical stresses, PFA is typically used in piping, tubing, and as the lining in vessels that will carry caustic chemicals. Medical and laboratory-grade tubing is commonly made with PFA. PFA is also key in fabricating various fittings and lining in components used in corrosive settings such as heat exchangers, valve liners, baskets for semiconductors, nozzles, insulator brushes, pumps, and electrical insulation. PFA is often used in fabricating gas scrubbers and reactors, as well as many areas in crude gas, coal, nuclear, and other types of industrial power plants. On geochemical or environmental analytical chemistry field sites, PFA is often used in sampling equipment as an inert material to help avoid trace levels of metallic ion contamination. MultiSource technicians use PFA in a broad range of applications, from the manufacturing of medical devices to semiconductor components.

To learn more about our uses of PFA, CPVC, PVC, and polypropylene in plastic fabrication processes, contact MultiSource Manufacturing LLC at (952) 456-5500. Request more information, or request a quote to get started with us today.