Need to package 2½ tons of sliced cheese or sausage per minute? Even if you don’t need that extreme throughput, you certainly want highly accurate portion packs that assure your customer of receiving precisely the amount of product they are paying for.

Either way, you’ll want to start with a slicer that can handle it. Here, in a story first reported by the CAN in Automation organization to highlight an application of the CANopen network standard, is how such high speed, flexible systems from Weber feed, scan, cut, portion, weigh, sort, buffer and transport product to be packaged.

This story dispels the common notion that food processing and packaging are two separate functions. Or that packaging machines are dominated by servo automation, whereas food processing is not. Weber machines are highly sophisticated, synchronized, software-driven systems benefiting from the power of ELAU’s PacDrive automation system.

Weber in fact exhibits at the Process Expo co-located with PACK EXPO every year, symbolically just a few aisles away form all those downstream flow wrappers, baggers, thermoformers and case packers.

Read the whole story.