Prima Cheese, based in Seaham, County Durham, is installing a third Ishida multihead weigher to handle its range of cheese products supplied to wholesale food and catering businesses worldwide.
The new CCW-RS-214 features Ishida’s latest innovation for handling sticky products, with special electro-static polished surfaces that enable the cheese to move quickly and easily through the weigher to maximise throughput.
The 14-head model will join two existing ten-head versions, handling a variety of bag sizes including 1kg, 1.8kg, 2kg and 5kg as well as smaller sample packs, enabling Prima Cheese to pack around 30,000 boxes of product each week.
The installation of the first Ishida weigher in 2008 had a huge impact on Prima Cheese’s operation in terms of increases in speed, weighing accuracy and efficiency, and made a major contribution to the company’s continuing success and growth. Prior to this, weighing speeds using a linear system were around nine bags per minute; today the Ishida weighers can handle 2kg packs at 25 bags per minute. While speeds could be faster – particularly with the new 14-head model – Prima prefers to maintain a manageable speed that keeps the production line running constantly.
"The Ishida weighers are very reliable; typically the only downtime we experience is when we need to change the film and this only takes around three minutes," comments Prima Cheese operations director Nima Beni.
Another very important benefit for Prima is that the weighers are extremely practical.
"Their hygienic design is very easy to clean and that is a vital consideration for a dairy product," continues Nima. "The weighers are also simple to operate with changeovers between pack sizes undertaken at literally the touch of a button."
Established in 1996, Prima Cheese has enjoyed significant growth and today supplies customers in the UK, Europe and throughout the rest of the world, including Dubai and the UAE, Peru, Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, Taiwan and Singapore. The installation of the CCW-RS-214 is part of the company’s next phase of growth, which includes an extension to its factory to incorporate expanded production and storage areas and new offices.
"When it comes to weighing equipment we won’t have anything else," concludes Nima. "The Ishidas do exactly what is required of them – and just as important, we receive excellent service and support from the team at Ishida."
