Ishida Rotary Salad filler

Ready-to-eat salads are popular, and changing trends in salad means recipes must continually evolve to capture consumer interest in this competitive segment. Fast, flexible systems are needed to process high-quality, salad-based meals ‘on demand’ and the relatively short shelf life of fresh salad can be a challenge.

Ishida has extensive experience in packing salad products and filling into preformed trays. Its salad solutions for pre-prepared salads provide good quality and high processing speeds — for even the most complex ingredient mixes.

Packing salad into trays can be a challenge because the salad leaf has a free-flowing volume or ‘bulk density’ which can be up to three times the volume of the tray. This basically means the leaf will not fit naturally into the confines of the tray, which causes it to spill over easily when it’s packed.

The Ishida Rotary Salad filler is an automatic, high-speed equipment solution — which uses state-of-the-art technology to overcome this problem — and makes packing salad easier and more cost-effective.

The equipment automatically fills salad into preformed trays at high speeds with virtually no spillage at the fill point. It can process up to 50 trays/min/lane (on all pack formats) and when combined with an Ishida combination weigher, it fills trays cleanly, efficiently and cost-effectively.

Preformed trays can be fed by hand or via an automatic denesting system. The filler fills the tray via the Ishida combination weigher and tamps (settles) the product twice to ensure it is fully in the tray. Trays are then lowered at the exit of the machine to ensure all product remains in the tray. The equipment has been designed for standard market tray sizes from 140–450 g. Trays can be narrow or wide edge leading, and the solution is suitable for tray sealing, ultrasonic sealing or shrink banding.

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