National Weighing & Instruments have recently supplied a fresh food production company with a new Takeaway Portion Scale system to improve the manual portioning of their salad greens in small tubs. The takeaway portion scale has been used to determine how much product has been removed from a larger ‘bulk’ tray to enable easy, no-fuss manual handling.
Why is portioning food important?
In food production, it is important to ensure uniform portioning across a batch of product to guarantee value for money for the end user and reduce operator related waste costs. It is best to have a guide for operators instead of relying on the manual portioning estimation of the operator.
The takeaway portion scale is a great solution to this, it increases productivity and reduces ‘give-aways’. It is suitable for multiple applications above and beyond the previously mentioned, for example, pizza topping assembly.
What equipment was used?
In the system described above the takeaway, scale system consisted of a Bilancai diade DD1010i terminal alongside an AND SC30BM full stainless steel base work with the scale configured to reading 20kg x 2g. The target value was entered into the terminal to enable the operator to ‘take out’ the desired amount of product as appropriate. The screen of the indicator is designed to clearly display whether the weight is acceptable, too low or too high by the screen background turning either green, red or yellow respectively. The system does not allow the operator to move on to the next portion until the weight of the current portion is acceptable. The Diade DD1010i monitors the accuracy of the product being removed and can provide reports on throughput, the number of packs produced by an operator and the totals weighed. Depending on the configuration, the DD1010i is intelligent enough to reduce the tolerance windows once the operator is achieving a high level of repeatable accuracy in portioning.
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