Employees at a major dairy manufacturing site were lugging 40-pound boxes of cheese curds from a freezer room to then lift and empty into a tall vibratory screener that initiated preparation for breading. Relying heavily on difficult manual labor, this customer reached out to improve their production process.
Application specialists at Triton Innovation, LLC came up with a clever, reliable solution that would maximize line efficiency and ergonomics. After learning that employees had to go back and forth between a freezer room retrieving heavy boxes of cheese curds to manually unload and meter into a tall vibratory screener, Triton had a shortcut in mind.
A conveyor alone would help, but to really assist employees with ergonomics and productivity, the Triton team recommended a 10 cubic foot capacity Metering Hopper be added and lowered for a less straining unloading process. Casters made the hopper portable for easy steering and transportation to storage areas and washdown locations. Instead of hauling and slowly dumping one box at a time, workers could now unload up to four boxes of cheese curds directly into the hopper all at once, which cut time, unnecessary labor, and enabled employees to perform other important tasks. From here, a manual slide gate on the Metering Hopper was opened and closed to control the flow rate of cheese curds that fed Triton’s hygienic Z-Style Belt Conveyor situated directly below. The Z-Style Conveyor alleviated lifting requirements by consistently elevating and feeding metered amounts of cheese curds into our customer’s vibratory screener, where small, unusable pieces were eliminated from their product flow before reaching the breading line.
This compact but mighty Metering Feeder System automated flow control and increased productivity, making cheese curd preparation for the breading line far less straining and far more efficient. Our innovative, ergonomic, and customized solution was so effective that this customer ordered a second system!
