Canadian Packaging Sep 2014

MOST DARING ADVENTURE
Quebec bakery’s automation investment hits the packaging line efficiency sweet spot
Dare Foods’ Saint-Martin facility maintenance manager Matthew Beauchamp holds semi-finished boxes constructed by the high-speed Delkor
Trayfecta S4 1502 carton former.
ANDREW JOSEPH,
FEATURES EDITOR
PHOTOS BY PIERRE LONGTIN
No manufacturer of global renown has
ever gotten to be that way without daring
to set high goals for itself, and Kitchener,
Ont.-headquartered Dare Foods
Limited is as fine a testament to the virtues of dreaming big and reaching high as
any major Canadian food producer out
there—even after more than 120 years
in the highly competitive baked-goods
business.
Founded in 1892 by Charles
Henry Doerr under the name of C.H.
Doerr Company, the family-owned
business that rose to iconic prominence as a manufacturer of delicious,
high-quality cookies is nowadays also
a major North American player in the
market segments for crackers, fine
breads, candies and other baked goodies and treats that busy modern-day
consumers can’t seem to get enough
of—including the very popular line
of snack-bread products produced
at the company’s highly-automated,
140-employee breadmaking facility in
Saint-Martin, Que.
One of six manufacturing
plants operated by Dare Foods in North
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America—employing over 1,300
people in total—the Saint-Martin
plant is home to the company’s very
popular line of Boulangerie Grissol
brand portfolio purchased by Dare
Foods in its 2001 acquisition of the
cookie and fine breads business of
the Montreal-based Culinar Inc.
Housing two baking lines
and three packaging lines, the busy
plant turns out the full range of
Boulangerie Grissol brand products,
including the perennial bestseller
Melba toast, Canapé, Bread Sticks
and Baguette Bites, along with the recently-lunched new favorites such as
CANADIAN PACKAGING • SEPTEMBER 2014
Morning Thins, thin crispy slices of
bakerystyle loaves with seeds, fiber
and fruit for on-the-go mornings;
Sweet Thins, a sweet calorie-controlled snack; and Artisanal Baguettes, a line of premium quality,
oven-baked baguettes made under
authentic recipes and using fresh
natural ingredients like black olives,
cinnamon and raisin, or cranberry
and figs.
Lead Role
“We are a leading Canadian
fine bread manufacturer,” says
Saint-Martin maintenance manager Matthew Beauchamp, noting the
company considers itself to be one
of the leading players in the fine
bread market segment across North
America, despite growing competition from both imports and private-label store brands.
“Increased competition is
a reality for us,” Beauchamp told
Canadian Packaging in a recent
interview, “but we constantly strive
to remain competitive by launching
new and innovative products.”
“We also look at our bottom line results with the realization that by constantly updating
our manufacturing equipment, we
will not only improve our production line speed and efficiency, but
will also reduce our manufacturing costs,” says Beauchamp, citing
four major facility expansions and
innumerable equipment upgrades
taking place at the Saint-Martin factory since it first started producing
the venerable Boulangerie Grissol
products back in the 1940s under
previous owners.
As the plant’s maintenance
manager, it is Beauchamp’s job to
ensure the plant’s production and
packaging lines are always running
up to snuff, which is no easy task for a
plant “producing on three shifts a day,
covering the entire week—with regularly scheduled sanitation—24-hoursa-day and seven-days-a-week.”
Despite
the
plant’s
high-throughput rates and growing
volumes, Beauchamp says the facility
does not take any shortcuts that would
in any way undermine the final quality of the product manufactured at
Saint-Martin.
“After fresh ingredients are
mixed in batches to produce dough,
we process it into various pans, and
bake it in large ovens,” he relates. “After depanning, the cooked loaves are
placed onto large wheeled racks and
are refrigerated for several days to ensure most of the humidity is removed.
“Removing it from the refrigerated section, we slice the now-dry
bread, and further toast it on a processing line specific to the type of cut
and packaging required,” Beauchamp
expands.
“After
packaging—either
semi-automatically or fully-automatically—the packaged products are palletized and immediately placed into
vans for shipment to our distribution
center which will then ensure our
products go to the proper destination.”
For a company that is often
credited with rewriting the book on
cookie packaging in Canada, having
borrowed a trick from coffee packaging and introducing the tin-tie strip
to cookie packaging in 1954 to make
it a new de facto cookie industry standard, the performance of packaging machinery and equipment at the
Saint-Martin facility naturally get all
the close scrutiny and attention it duly
deserves, according to Beauchamp.
“When I became the maintenance manager for the Saint-Martin
plant last year, I noticed early on that
CANADIAN PACKAGING • SEPTEMBER 2014
an existing carton former that was in use on
one of our major line was not up to par,” he
says.
“Relative to our needs, it was a
poor design that featured overly complicated changeovers and adjustments that,
quite frankly, caused us a lot of unnecessary
downtime.
“Back in the summer of 2011, I was
looking for a simple, robust, yet high-performance design with a high level of performance and efficiency, and I found one that
offered all of that in one,” relates
Beauchamp. “We found that at Delkor.”
Delkor Systems, Inc., a St. Paul,
Minnesota headquartered designer and
manufacturer of packaging machinery,
installed a brand-new Trayfecta S4 1502
model case, carton and tray former at the
Saint-Martin facility.
According to Beauchamp, it was
when he worked for Dare’s engineering department that he first considered them for a
project.
“I was impressed by the equipment that they
offered, but unfortunately, that project fell
through,” relates Beauchamp.
Delkor sales manager Fred Sowa
says that for the latest project Dare Foods
was looking for a new tray former, but that
“the actual carton matrix they presented was
a bit unique in that they had a large format
that ran quite slow and that the other smaller formats required speeds up to 90 cartons
per minute.”
Head Start
According to Sowa, the Trayfecta S4
1502 was the best possible solution for Dare
Foods, allowing it to utilize two heads for
the higher rate, while only one head would
be required for the slower rates, a flexibility
offered by the machine that is considered to
be unique in the business.
“We actually design and manufacture three other carton formers, with another having four heads allowing for forming
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speeds over 200 cartons per minute, but
the 1502 matched so perfectly for this
mix of size and rate required, that it was
a no-brainer for us to recommend it to
Dare Foods,” advises Sowa.
He adds that since Dare required
a nominal rate of 78 with a surge rate of
90 cartons per minute for their fastest requirement.
Delkor was aware that the speed
on these machines is dictated by the carton size and style, “But on the 1502, we
can mechanically operate at 60 cycles
per minute so the machine is not being
stressed.”
Key features of the Trayfecta S4
1502 include:
• A tool-less changeover that takes three
minutes per head thanks to three servo motors that actually do most of the
work automatically;
• Fixed tooling sets that are simple to install, enabling instant startup on the first
cycle for immediate formation of quality cartons, with less costly carton waste;
• Changeovers that are easy for operators of all skill levels, via an HMI (human-machine interface), that is very
intuitive with easy-to-follow procedures;
• Provide a thorough training and
support for independent operation
by the plant.
• Ability to run three materials: paperboard, corrugated and microflute
materials with just a minor tooling
change.
“You might note that Delkor
seems to be a wee bit obsessed with
the number three—but when we are
talking about the Trayfecta series, it
is by design, as it is a play on the word
Pre-printed box flats ready to be placed into the Trayfecta S4 1502 carton
former, to be glued into shape with the Nordson ProBlue 7 hot-melt adhesive applicating system.
Flat paperboard sheets being pneumatically transferred inside the Delkor
Trayfecta carton former to be glued and then assembled at high speeds.
The Delkor Trayfecta system utilizes the Nordson ProBlue 7 hot-melt
adhesive dispensing and applicating system for forming the paperboard
cartons at high throughput speeds.
A close-up of the Trayfecta carton forming machine shows cavities being
formed in the cartons to make just the right amount of space for the packaged product.
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CANADIAN PACKAGING • SEPTEMBER 2014
‘trifecta’, bringing the power of three
to the forming applications,” reveals
Sowa.
“The Trayfecta can also run
three different package formats—
cartons, cases and trays, and handles glued, locking and fold-over
lock designs,” he expands.
“Should you require it, it
could form a paperboard carton
on one lane, while at the same time
form a corrugated case in the other
lane,” states Sowa. “It’s just that impressive.”
To handle rough going
at Dare Foods, the Trayfecta S4
1502 boasts a robust construction
with fixture head slide guides that
maintains a stroke tolerance within 0.008-inches for repeatable and
close tolerance motion.
The Trayfecta S4 1502 utilizes a Rockwell Automation
Allen-Bradley brand PanelView
Plus 700 for easy operator interaction, and a ProBlue 7 hot-melt adhesive system to seal the cartons,
cases and trays, manufactured by
Nordson Corporation.
Now using the Trayfecta
S4 1502 for cartoning of the Melba
toast products, and the new Sweet
Thins and Morning Thins products,
Beauchamp is quite happy with the
whole project.
“Everything worked out
very well,” he begins. “The machine
was up and running in no time, and
it passed all the SAT (site acceptance test) and commissioning at a
99.5 per cent efficiency.
“We went from a two-hour
changeover that took another two
hours to fine-tune in production
with our old machine, to a less than
10-minute changeover that generated perfect cartons in the first cycle
after startup,” recalls Beauchamp.
Formed cartons exit the Trayfecta S4 system via
conveyor to be filled with product.
The Markem-Imaje 6064 thermal ink coder and
the Loma IQ2 metal detection system pair up for
optimal product coding and quality assurance.
Sowa concurs, noting that
Delkor performed substantial testing
prior to the customer’s factory acceptance test.
“Once their team arrived, we
followed Dare’s extensive protocol to
prove the machine,” says Sowa.
Beauchamp says he was also
happy about the fairly simple training
for Dare Foods’ operators.
“After only about 12 hours of
training, a new operator could run
and perform changeover with the
Trayfecta within the required time,”
Beauchamp says, noting that Delkor’s
assembly technicians also serve as the
installation service support.
“As such, when we do our extensive training with the customer in
our facility, and follow through at the
installation with the same technicians,
we can provide a training service that
is perfectly in tune with people who
are familiar with not only the tray former, but also Dare’s requirements,” relates Sowa.
Other key equipment installed
at the Saint-Martin facility include:
• a Bosch Packaging Technology robotic top-loading system;
• a Markem-Imaje model 6064 ther-
mal inkjet coder;
• a Loma Systems model IQ2 metal detection system;
• flexible stand-up pouch packaging machinery for the new Boulangerie Grissol Artisanal Baguettes products.
Beauchamp says he is convinced
that the bakery will continue to move forward to be the best in the market segment.
CANADIAN PACKAGING • SEPTEMBER 2014
DARE FOODS TIME-LINE
The humble start to the Dare Foods
empire began when Doerr began making
and selling hand-made cookies at his own
grocery store located in Berlin, Ont.—a
predominantly German community now
known as Kitchener, about an hours drive
west of Toronto.
By the time World War I had ended, the company a locally well-known and
fairly successful cookie and candy business.
Unfortunately, Doerr’s son Webourne and daughter-in-law Irene both
died of the Spanish Flu of 1918, but he carried on by running the business and raising
his infant grandson, Carl.
By 1933, Carl began working at the
family business and took over at the age of
24 when Charles passed away in 1941.
After the factory burned down in
1943, the business-savvy Carl bravely pro-
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Dare Foods employs a robotic top-loading system to execute gentle and
efficient placement of packs of Melba toast in the outer boxes.
ceeded to rebuild and modernize the factory, and change his family name.
Perhaps because his family name
was of Germanic-origin, and Canada was
at war with Germany, Carl surmised that
a name change might be good for business, proceeding to change both his surname and company name to Dare, and
soon after starting to ship product to all
regions of Canada.
Not content with just producing
food products, the company also took an
active role in its food packaging. In 1954,
Dare Foods took a coffee packaging concept and introduced cookie packaging to
the tin tie-strip. The new format allowed
consumers to reseal the bag to better
maintain the product’s freshness, ultimately becoming the de facto standard of
cookie packaging in Canada.
By 1956 the company had penetrated into the lucrative U.S. market, and
in 1983 introduced the popular Breton
Machine operator using the Allen-Bradley PanelView Plus 700 terminal
to monitor and control operations of the Delkor Trayfecta S4 model 1502
carton former.
cracker line, which became a bestseller
in both Canada and the U.S.
Other key expansions include:
• The construction in 1989 of a fully-automated soft-candy manufacturing plant in Milton, Ont., bringing the
European style RealFruit Gummies to
North America;
• The building of a cracker bakery on a
33-acre Greenfield site in Spartanburg,
S.C., which helped Dare become more
of a major presence in the North American market;
• A 1999 acquisition of the 134-year-old
Bremmer Biscuit Company of Denver,
Co. adding Bremmer Wafers to its lineup;
• A 2001 acquisition of the cookie and
fine breads business of Culinar Inc.,
adding the BearPaws, Whippet, Wagon
Wheels and Viva Puffs brands, as well
as the classic Melba toast, Canapé and
Bread Sticks products, sold under the
16 • WWW.CANADIANPACKAGING.COM
Boulangerie Grissol brand name;
• Being chosen by the Girl Guides of
Canada as the exclusive supplier of
their cookies in 2002;
• In 2003 it became one of the first
companies in North America to turn
all its facilities peanut-free in response to public concerns over nutbased allergies.
Manufactured in Canada
and the U.S., Dare Foods has a wide
range of cookies, crackers, fine breads
and RealFruit candy all of which are
available throughout North America
and in more than 30 other countries
around the world.
CANADIAN PACKAGING • SEPTEMBER 2014