The New W-Pack – Keeping Up With Citrus Packing Trends

Delivering on our promise to extend the life of machines and deliver flexible options to the market place, we have designed the ‘W-Pack’ which can simply be produced with a low cost addition kit to the ‘UB Girbagger’ range of machines.

The ‘W Pack’ can be used for a whole variety of fresh produce up to 1kg such as citrus, apples, onions, potatoes and sprouts. The format allows your product to stand up or lay flat and gloss, matt or transparent films can be designed for maximum effect.  Although there is a large printable area, the W Pack still provides good airflow around the products.  The size and shape of the window may vary depending on the graphics of the film and the designer’s creativity.  Handle options make this one of the most innovative fresh produce packs currently on the market.

The new PDG-4, the most accurate citrus weigher on the market

 The PDG-4 is a machine based on its predecessor, the PDG-3, keeping most chassis, mechanical, pneumatic and electrical parts. Visually identical to the PDG3, the difference is in the technology of the machine.
 
The accuracy of this type of weigher is based on three parameters: precise weighing of the buckets, having a large volume of buckets (to obtain a large number of combinations) and having an advanced algorithm to produce the best accuracy.
 
The PDG-4 improves 2 of these 3 parameters significantly.  The Giro Research and Development team looked to see how they could improve on the already accurate PDG3 machine as part of ongoing development.  
 
The load cells have been replaced (a key element for weighing) with more accurate and faster units. Secondly, the modifications have been made the moving buckets stabilised. To make an analogy, we can have very expensive bathroom scales but if we weigh ourselves when jumping or moving the weight won’t be precise.
 
New calculation algorithm
 
Last but not least this is another key element. Once each bucket has been weighted as precisely as possible the ‘brain’ of the machine must decide which combination of buckets is the optimal for achieving the target weight, or find a weight very close if the target weight can’t be achieved.
 
This machine brain uses much more accurate calculation, a faster processor and a new algorithm that optimises many factors to consider in order to improve speed and precision weighing.
 
Xact are currently installing several  PDG4 machines across the UK and they are already delivering results.

Increased flexibility of ‘Display Until’ and ‘Use By’ date printing.

“Display until” or “Best Before” dates on labels have always been a problem if production planning dictates that you should pack several days ahead of the batch being shipped to the distribution depot, as is the case with many fruit and vegetable pack houses.
 
This usually causes problems as the old programmes were fairly inflexible with lots of manual modifications to the label design being required to adjust the dates shown on the label. This can often lead to mistakes being made and labels left with the modified dates rather than the original date.
 
When a label sent to the packing machine asks the operator for the “Depot Day”(the day the product will leave to move to the distribution depot), the offset days are now calculated from the depot date. An added safe guard is that the range of dates can be restricted to stop “Display until”, “Best Before” dates a year in advance, for example.
 
The modification, which can also allow fruit caliber to be chosen at the time of packing is supplied as a “plugin” (a small additional “add on program” to the current version of Girprint). The label delivery screen shows what will be printed so the operator can check the dates before committing to printing.