Automatic horizontal form-fill-seal packaging system keeps business from going to seed
A seed manufacturer installs an automatic horizontal form-fill-seal packaging system to reduce labor and increase bagging capacity.
Since before 1992, Performance Seed Co.'s St. Cloud, Minn., plant used four bag-packing lines to keep up with their bird and lawn seed packing business. The lines included three automatic vertical form-fill-seal packaging systems and one manual packaging system. Performance Seed needed to fill bags of several sizes, and its vertical form-fill-seal systems couldn't fill bags over 5 pounds. The larger the bag, the taller a vertical system had to be, and the plant didn't have the headroom to accommodate taller equipment. Because the vertical systems couldn't handle large bags, the company was forced to manually package them.