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The Locher brewery is known in Switzerland for its beer specialities. However, the environmentally conscious company also utilises by-products from the brewing process and processes them into high-quality food products. The company has now invested in packaging technology for its own "Tschipps". A multihead weigher from Ishida has been integrated into the new fully automatic system.
The Locher brewery from Appenzell does not want to put up with waste in food production and is constantly working on solutions to reduce waste. Their approach is to use nutrient-rich Transforming by-products from the brewing process, from brewer's yeast to wort and spent grains, into flavoursome foods. These particularly sustainable products such as snacks, pizza, muesli and meat alternatives are then sold under the food upcycling brand "Brewbee" in Swiss supermarkets and in the company's own web shop.
Snacks made from spent grains
Flavoursome snacks are not only popular with beer drinkers. Thus the "Tschipps" has been a bestseller since its launch in 2017 of the brewery. The snack product contains a lot of vegetable fibre and significantly less fat than conventional potato crisps, for example. The basic ingredients are nutritious barley malt spent grain from the brewhouse as well as vitamin-rich yeast and starter wort from the brewery's fermentation cellar. Potatoes, corn, sunflower oil and spices are also added. Today, the company produces "Tschipps" in five flavours at its Bühler site, which are packaged in three different pouch formats.
In-house" packaging process
In the early days, the Locher brewery outsourced the packaging of the "Tschipps" to a service provider. However, in view of the 30 to 40 per cent annual growth, the decision was soon made to no longer outsource the process to the copacker, but to carry it out in-house, and the value creation within the company. The elimination of transport routes has also improved the carbon footprint.
The brewery commissioned Itech AG from Rotkreuz with the installation of a fully automated packaging system. Ishida in Switzerland, and thus received a contact partner for the entire line. The packaging experts designed a system consisting of product feeders, multi-head weigher, flow-wrapping machine and racks. consists of. The seasoning system has also been integrated into the line.
In the first process step, the freshly fried snacks are transferred to a rack via a hopper belt and an inclined conveyor and fed to the seasoning system. To prevent the machine vibrations from being transmitted to the downstream multihead weigher, this was placed on a separate rack. An intermittently operating flow-wrapping machine with an upstream metal detector is located below the weigher. The end of the line is marked by a turntable for final packaging.
Fast and precise dosing
Within the packaging line, the Dosing plays a key role to. The "Tschipps" must be portioned as quickly and precisely as possible into the bags. This task can be reliably fulfilled with a multihead weigher. The manufacturer Ishida developed the CCW-SE3 series specifically for the automatic weighing of dry, free-flowing products with small target weights, as is the case with the Locher brewery's application. The features of the weigher include Easy to use and their hygiene-friendly design. The contact parts can be removed without tools for wet cleaning.
The snacks fall from above onto the distribution plate of the ten-person scale, whereby their feed is automatically regulated by a load cell. Vibrating, separately controllable radial chutes transport the products evenly to the trays, whose flaps are driven by high-performance stepper motors.
One Digital weighing signal filtering enables high accuracy of 0.1 grams for calculating weight combinations. The weigher discharges the precisely dosed product portions through a funnel directly into the flow-wrapping machine for filling. The Locher brewery currently produces packaging with filling weights of ten, 30 and 90 grams. Product changeovers are carried out at lightning speed by calling up presettings. Depending on the format, between 30 and 50 bags are filled per minute, although significantly higher speeds are possible with the Ishida CCW-SE3 multihead weigher. The performance also meets the specifications in terms of accuracy, with a maximum overfill of 1.2 grams.
Basis for further growth
The Locher AG brewery, based in Appenzell, has been an independent family business for five generations. The innovative spirit of this speciality brewery is the source of the exciting variety and the high quality of the well-known beer specialities such as Quöllfrisch beyond.
The brewery wants to continue the success story of "Tschipps" with the help of the new process technology. Specifically, it plans to introduce another packaging format of 150 grams. "And one day we want to use all the spent grains from our brewing process sustainably," says Yves Habermacher, Head of Food Production, looking to the future.
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