Meat packers print and network via Ethernet

By Jim Montague, Executive Editor

PACKING PORK is no picnic. Despite adding automation where practical and appropriate in recent decades, meat processing and packing still involves a tremendous amount of repetitive manual labor. So, as is the case with most chores, any assistance and respite is extremely welcome.

Providing some added relief and efficiency was the basic mission the developers, engineers, and machine builders at the Cryovac food packaging division of Sealed Air began a three-year project to reinvent its bag-dispensing machine for food processors. These users typically are packaging fresh, red meat, usually large cuts of pork, which often are shipped to locations such as restaurants for further processing. As the product comes through the line, operators cut it, bag it, and vacuum seal it.

Cryovac makes a variety of bags used in packing houses. However, one of the main problems had been that the meat packers’ boxes of pre-printed bags often had to be switched as different products were processed. Consequently, the packers wanted a bagger with print capability, so they wouldn’t have to change rolls as frequently. On-machine printing also would allow them to add date and time stamps, as well as more-specific product-grade information. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) requires increasingly more detailed documentation and better traceability from many food and beverage manufacturers.

	FIGURE 1: PRINTING AND DISPENSING
	Cryovac’s BL135 Smart Rack Roll serrated bag printer and dispenser has in-line, thermal transfer capabilities, and is designed to work with manual loading systems.

“Our customers used to have three boxes of bags, one each for prime, select, and choice cuts. So, when there was a grade change, they’d have to switch boxes to get to the correct label,” says Wayne Workman, Cryovac’s senior design associate. “This might only take a couple of minutes, but over time could add up to a lot of lost labor. Now, they have one 12x24-in. roll of 1,000 blank bags with their company’s logo and space to add variable information.”

Papa’s Brand New Bag
Launched about a year ago, BL135 Smart Rack roll serrated bag dispenser provides the plant-floor printing that Cryovac’s customers were seeking (See Figure 1). BL135 prints up to a 2x4-in. monochrome graphic image on bags, which means it can add required date codes and other text directly onto the bags. Each printer typically can produce as many as 15 different labels.

“A human-machine interface displays the packer’s fixed label before printing, which allows the operator to make sure the proper label will be dispensed,” says Workman. “This means a lot less wasted bag inventory, but it also gives users a lot more flexibility. We now can print a different label on every bag if necessary. This is the first machine we know of that can do on-the-fly changes.”

Networking Aids Expandability
Not content with merely adding printing functions to one machine, Cryovac next sought to organize its bag dispensers into modular head units that could be linked and expanded as needed by particular packers. Each unit would have one printer and one-sized roll of bags, and could then be combined into a machine with up to four total units, allowing up to four different bag sizes (See Figure 2 below).

“These units originally were designed to operate with discrete I/O and point-to-point wiring, but that meant we couldn’t combine them into an expanded machine,” explains Workman. “To accomplish this expansion, we evaluated using a fieldbus such as DeviceNet. We looked at having PLCs with their software programs run the four dispensers, but we found that we couldn’t physically connect our I/O to it. We found that EtherNet/IP was able to make this system easily expandable.

FIGURE 2: COMBINING UNITS
Cryovac can combine up to four printer/dispenser units, which allows packers to choose up to four different bag sizes.

“We learned that for DeviceNet to run clean, we needed to have all the devices physically on the network,” adds Workman. “This conflicted with our efforts to make BL135 available to users with modular and expandable units. It would have required a lot of extra software.”

Once they settled on EtherNet/IP, Cryovac’s engineers chose an Allen-Bradley FlexLogix processor to run it. “This made it simple to add on units without extra programming, because we had the remote I/O on Ethernet,” says Workman. “For example, if we already had a machine with two or three dispensers on it, we could simply add another because the overall system would already have all the remote I/O in it to accept that fourth device.”