1,315 kg (2,900 Pounds) of Tomato Unloaded in Less Than 10 Minutes

You are standing next to another 1,135 litre (300 gallon) tote of tomato paste. It is going to take 2 of your employees all day to unload the material so you can begin cooking. Market demand is going up and orders are starting to fall behind. You have a huge bottleneck. You need a solution.

Food Service Specialities had the same problem. Based in Red Wing, Minnesota, FSS produces custom tomato and dairy based sauces for private label. They needed a way to fulfil the increasing orders from their downstream restaurant, frozen food and retail grocer partners.

25 years ago, throughput shot through the roof. Two, 2-piston pump Graco unloading systems were installed. These systems cut evacuation times to 20 minutes per 1,135 litre (300 gallon) tote. 22,679 kg (50,000 pounds) of tomato products were unloaded daily. How long is it taking to manually scoop product out and what about the labour costs on that? Food Service Specialities has one employee with a forklift moving product in, setting the system up, unloading and removing the empty totes. Pure efficiency.

Over time those 25 year-old Senator piston pumps began to break down. To fix the increasing maintenance burden, Anderson Dahlen, manufacturing solutions provider, upgraded the systems to the Graco SaniForce 2.0 Bin Evacuation System (BES).

Anderson Dahlen installed two 4-piston pump bin evacuation systems with electronic PLCs. These new systems cut unloading time by more than half, evacuating 1,315 kg (2,900 pounds) of tomato product in less than 10 minutes. Food Service Specialities is unloading 26 totes per day doubling their production to 46,359 kg (100,000 pounds) per day.

Process equipment integrator, Spec Engineering, further reduced unloading time. An additional I/O panel was installed to tie into the Graco BES operator control station. This allowed for reduced unloading times and seamless integration into the customer’s existing Clean-In-Place (CIP) regimen.

Further process improvements were seen in cleaning the systems. The SaniForce 2.0 product line was designed to make the cleaning process easy. It used to take five hours for one worker to clean the four Senator piston pumps. Cleaning time is now 3 hours, even after adding 4 more pumps.

Andy Ahern is the plant manager for Food Service Specialities. After having such great results with the original unloader system, he didn't think twice about which system to upgrade to. Graco pumps move tomatoes the best for the longest time.