COVER STORY

HEINZ NORTH AMERICA

PLANT OPERATIONS

OLD PLANT

learns
lots of NEW TRICKS

F O O D PAC K AG E R O F T H E Y E A R

Heinzs main ketchup facility, built in 1937, keeps up with an

ever-greater variety of packaging sizes and formats.

f ketchup is the red blood of

the H.J. Heinz Co. product
portfolio, the plant in
Fremont, Ohio, is its heart.
The 900,000-square-foot
facility (about equally divided
between operations and a distribution center) produces about
70% of the companys ketchup
sold in the United States. The
annual production
by Pan Demetrakakes
of 35 million cases
Executive Editor
is packaged in
sizes ranging from
single-serve packets (28 million
of them per day) to three-gallon
bulk pouches for foodservice.
The plant has to handle 80
stock-keeping units (SKUs) of
bottles and more than 40 printed
varieties of single-serve packets.
The task is made more daunting
by the age of both the plant (built
in 1937) and its machinery, some
key components of which are
more than 20 years old.
Nonetheless, Fremont consis-

44

FOOD&DRUG PACKAGING / OCTOBER 2007

Foodservice bottles, which arrive on slip sheets, are depalletized.

tently operates at efficiency levels

of 90% or better (computed,
roughly speaking, by dividing
maximum throughput into actual
output). One of the biggest ongoing challenges, says area production manager Ryan Baker, is getting changeovers, which are

almost always performed over

weekends, done so that startup
will take place without a hitch on
Monday morning. Operations
run 24 hours a day on weekdays.
With all the improvements
and all the new innovations that
weve had with bottles, the num-

www.fdp.com

The large, flat closures needed for the 16-ounce

inverted foodservice bottle didnt require any major
changes to capping operations. The biggest change is
that the hopper can now hold only five to 10 minutes
worth of production instead of 20.

Upside-down foodservice
bottles are among Heinzs
newest ketchup packages.

ber of changeovers have

increased, Baker says. And
thats why startup is our biggest
operational hurdle right now. We
have to make sure were still hitting the operational efficiencies
we saw years ago, but now weve
added more complexity to the
operation. We have additional
change parts, additional
changeovers, new bottle sizes.
The new bottle sizes include
the upside-down bottle (known
in-house as the Bottoms Up)
that debuted in 2004, and the
Fridge Fit bottle, a compact
shape designed for refrigerator
door shelves. The Fridge Fit, in
46- and 64-ounce sizes, rolled
out last year with great success.
The comparatively large sizes
are a big plus for Heinz, says
Tracey Parsons, associate manager for marketing public relations: We want to sell more
ketchup in less plastic.

www.fdp.com

Handling challenges
With new bottles come new challenges. The Fridge Fit ran fine in
its 64-ounce version, but the 46ounce one had handling problems. The shape of the sides of
the bottle, because the profile is

adjustments, how we ramp up

and slow down our conveyors, all
the accelerations and decelerations.What we tried to do was
increase the conveyor speeds
while reducing the line pressure.
It worked, but they cant rest
on their laurels. The 46-ounce
Fridge Fit bottle is subject to the
same imperative as just about
every other bottle: the less plastic,
the better. Less than a year after
its launch, the bottle is already
being looked at for possible
weight reduction.
Were always looking to see if
we can take a few grams out of

We have to make sure were still

hitting the operational efficiencies we
saw years ago, but now weve added
more complexity to the operation.
Ryan Baker, area production manager

carved in, combined with any

amount of line pressure, resulted
in the bottles wanting to climb
themselves, Baker says. They
get locked into that position and
fall out of the conveyors. So we
did a lot of work with the bottle
handling: conveyor speeds, rail

our bottles and see if we still have

the same performance, the same
quality, Baker says. That presents some operational issues:
You have to handle the containers, the caps, those types of materials, more delicately.
Plant personnel often have to 4

OCTOBER 2007 / FOOD&DRUG PACKAGING

45

COVER STORY

HEINZ NORTH AMERICA

PLANT OPERATIONS

make adjustments to equipment

thats been around a long time.
For instance, the rotary fillers on
some lines had mechanical control boxes above each fill head
with rocker arms that opened

and closed the fill valves when

they came into contact with stationary tabs mounted near the
filler. As fill speeds increased, the
rocker arms couldnt take the
additional impact. The filler was

Newly labeled bottles pass before a mirrored

station for visual inspection.

retrofitted with protruding buttons that perform the same function but are sturdier.
Continuous improvement is systematized through the Heinz
Operational Tracking System
(HOTS), in-house software that
monitors production and records
downtime. Data comes in both
automatically, through equipment
controllers, and manually, through
operator entry. HOTS provides
maintenance personnel with a
record of downtime events and,
more generally, lets the entire plant
know how productive its being.

The ketchup lineup

The Fremont plant comprises five
packaging lines for bottles, three
for bulk pouches, a #10 tin line,
eight banks of 28 fillers for singleserve packets and a 2.25 oz bottling line for hotel room service.
For the 16-ounce inverted foodservice bottle lines, the packaging
process starts with depalletizing,
which is done on equipment from
Simplimatic Automation. The bottles, from Ball Corp., go around a
U-shaped chain conveyor, from

46

FOOD&DRUG PACKAGING / OCTOBER 2007

www.fdp.com

Ambec Inc., that uses segments of

varying speeds to draw them into
single file, holding a vacuum on
them for stability. (All other plastic bottles at Fremont come from
Graham Packaging.)
The bottles travel to a lower
level, where they are inverted
and cleaned out with jets of sterilized air. They then go into an
enclosed fill area, which, like all
fill areas at Fremont, is fed with
HEPA-filtered air.
The 35-head filler, from Horix
Manufacturing Co., runs at about
365 bottles per minute and fills
the ketchup at 80? F. (Hot filling,
which is the norm for ketchup in
glass bottles, is not an option with
the multilayer plastic bottles.) The
capper, from Pneumatic Scale,
features arms that pluck closures
from a hopper-fed chute and
insert them into the chucks that
screw them onto the bottles.
When Heinz introduced upsidedown bottles, the closures got
bigger and heavier. This didnt
present a problem for the cappers,
Baker says, except that not as
many could fit in the hopper;
operators now have to replenish

them every five to 10 minutes,

instead of every 20.
As they emerge from the fill
room, the bottles are coded with
best-by dates and a factory code
by a Linx ink jet coder from

Diagraph. They pass under an

induction sealer from Lepel Corp.
that fastens an inner seal to the
bottles finish.
The rotary labeler, a Krones
Topmatic, applies front, back and

The Fremont plant is in the process of

installing automated vision systems for
label inspection on all bottle lines.

www.fdp.com

OCTOBER 2007 / FOOD&DRUG PACKAGING

47

COVER STORY

HEINZ NORTH AMERICA

PLANT OPERATIONS

Case packers with changeable heads pick up

an entire caseload of bottles at one time.

neck cold glue labels. The bottles

emerge and are inspected by an
operator at a mirrored station,
looking for misapplied or wrinkled labels. That situation will
soon change: Heinz is in the
process of installing automatic
inspection systems from CIVision
across all packaging lines. At the
time of Food & Drug Packagings
visit, the first such system had
been installed and was being
adjusted. After the CIVision sysHotel room service 2.25-ounce jars are
among the few remaining uses of glass
for ketchup packaging.

tems are in place, Fremont no

longer will maintain an
inspector on each bottle line;
only two inspectors will be
needed, to make sure the
rejected bottles get relabeled.
Fremont uses three types
of case packers on its bottle
lines. Two are drop-feed
packers from Hartness
International. Two are
Hartness Octopacks, which
features eight sets of grid
assemblies in different configurations, such as six by five,
that rotate slowly overhead and
descend to pick up the next cases
group of bottles. (The grid sets
can be changed out for different
case configurations.) Four are
wraparound case packers from
Wayne Automation that erect a
tray with shallow walls on two
sides, then lower an arm with a
grid that grips bottles and slides
them sideways into the tray,
between the walls. The system
then erects a divider and lowers
it over the bottles. The tray and

Ambec Inc.
800-899-4406; www.ambec.com

CIVision
630-446-7700; www.civision.com
FANUC Robotics America
800-47-ROBOT; www.fanucrobotics.com
Georgia-Pacific Corp.
404-652-4000; www.gp.com

FOOD&DRUG PACKAGING / OCTOBER 2007

dividers are from Georgia-Pacific.

Heinz, like many food processors, has moved away from regular corrugated cases for many
products. Trays are not only
cheaper, but preferred by many
retail trade customers, who set
them onto shelves after simply
removing the wrapping. But as
bottles get lighter, Heinz packaging personnel have to make sure
theyre protected by dividers
that can stand up to being
stacked on pallets. Plastic is
more expensive than corrugated, Baker says.

For more information

Ball Corp.
303-460-5541; www,ball.com

48

The Fremont plant produces 28 million singleserve foil foodservice packets a day.

Lepel Corp.
262-782-0450; www.cap-sealing.com
Meypack Packaging Systems USA
386-763-3312; www.meypackusa.com
O-I
419-247-5000; www.o-i.com
Pneumatic Scale
(Div. of Barry-Wehmiller)
330-923-0491;
www.pneumaticscale.com

Graham Packaging
717-849-8500

Simplimatic Automation
800-294-2003; www.simplimaticautomation.com

Hartness Intl
864-297-1200; www.hartness.com

Vongal Div. of HK Systems

804-794-6688; www.volpak.com

Horix Manufacturing Co.

412-771-1111; www.horix.net

Wayne Automation Corp.

610-630-8900; wayneautomation.com

Krones Inc.
414-409-4000; www.kronesusa.com

Winpack Lane Inc.

800-804-4224; www.winpak.com

www.fdp.com

Bottles are palletized by high-speed, dedicated

ram-style palletizers.

Servicing room service

Fremont also fills 2.25-ounce glass
jars for hotel room service, which
is a unique operation. The empty
jars, from O-I, come on pallets
separated by slip sheets. Because
the jars are light and have relatively low friction, theyre prone
to shifting on the slip sheets during shipment, which presents a
problem for depalletizing.
Fremont solved this problem with
a robotic depalletizer from
Meypack Packaging Systems USA
that uses lasers to locate the corners of the cluster of jars and
guide a vacuum slab that picks
up the entire layer. After the jars
are filled, another Meypack robot
picks up a case blank, erects it,
then picks up an entire layer of
jars and deposits it in the case.
One of Fremonts most
important products is singleserve ketchup packets, 28
million of which are
produced daily for
more than 40 different foodservice customers.
Two

www.fdp.com

webs of foil
from the
Pechiney Div.
of Alcan
Packaging
come together
in a Winpack
Lane 12-head
form-fill-seal
system. The
packets are
formed and filled, then slitters separate the rows and cutters separate
the columns, leaving the individual packets. These then pass under
a pair of rollers that squeeze them
against the conveyor belt; a camera
between the rollers watches for
any telltale ketchup blobs emerging from pinhole leaks. (If the system detects such leaks, it stops the
line and alerts an operator.)
For palletizing, Fremont
uses robotic palletizers
from FANUC North
America, for the single-serve lines, and
ram-style palletizers from
the Vongal
Div. of
HK

On the Web
For additional information on
Heinz North America, go to
www.fdp.com.

Systems, for the bottle lines. The

product is held in an on-site distribution center for periods ranging from 24 hours to 24 days.
The minimum holding
time of 24 hours is for
quality control, to see
if any problems
arise with package integrity
or other
issues.
F&DP

OCTOBER 2007 / FOOD&DRUG PACKAGING

49