A.M.P-Rose: A prototype process for high efficiency, high throughput, secondary packaging of snacks

A.M.P-Rose is one of the world's leading suppliers of processing and packaging machines for
the chocolate, confectionery, candy, biscuit and wafer industries. We supply new as well as
used and rebuilt confectionery machines of many types. In recent years, we have transferred
these skills into manufacturing savoury snack packaging machines to meet the growing
opportunity in this area.
Snack foods such as crisps are typically sealed into packets straight after manufacture to
preserve freshness. Different flavoured crisps will be manufactured and packaged on separate
lines. It is then common practice to bring together a collation of packets for secondary
packaging in a larger bag.
In a conventional collation packaging line, the packets are delivered from the individual
bagging lines, through a number of sorting stages and onto individual belts from where
packets are individually selected and suction-lifted into the collation line by robotic devices.
Because this selection and lifting operation is slow, a number of robotic devices are needed.
These are extremely expensive and require a large amount of floor space. Also on a
convetional line, changeover to a new product type or collation can result in significant
downtime because the machinery has to be manually adjusted.
We have designed an novel collating packaging line, which uses a conveying system and new
servo technology to feed individual packets to the wrapper for multipacking. The benefits
include:
* higher throughput
* automatic change-over
* bale formatting
* increased efficiency
* lower capital costs