Walking into the assembly workshop of the ply-pack packaging machine factory, a row of silver-gray shell pillow packaging machines are undergoing final debugging. The engineer touches the screen lightly, and the equipment wraps biscuits, candies and other products into the film in a smooth rhythm. It only takes 0.3 seconds to complete the cutting and sealing action-this marks that domestic packaging equipment has entered a new stage in automation and precision.
Industry demand has surged, and pillow packaging machines have become a "hot item"
In recent years, with the expansion of the snack food market, companies have increased their requirements for packaging efficiency. Traditional manual packaging is not only slow, but also has a high breakage rate when facing fragile products such as puffed foods and quick-frozen snacks. The pillow packaging machine has gradually become a standard equipment in the baking, quick-frozen, and snack industries due to its high-speed continuous operation and adaptive product size.
"We just delivered 6 production lines to a nut company in Shandong last month." The technical director of ply-pack revealed, "Their macadamia nuts used to be packaged with semi-automatic equipment, and could only complete 20 bags per minute. Now they use our pillow packaging machine, and the efficiency has doubled." Although the specific data was not disclosed, the model being tested in the workshop showed that when the conveyor belt of the assembly line accelerated, the equipment could still accurately capture the position of each nut, and the sealing flatness was comparable to that of high-end imported equipment.
Not only fast, intelligence is the key to breaking through
Compared with ten years ago, today's pillow packaging machines have long broken through the functional limitations of "simple film wrapping". The new generation of models has a built-in AI visual inspection system, which can identify defects such as leaks and wrinkles in real time during the packaging process, and alarm synchronously through the cloud platform. The purchasing manager of a well-known pastry company reported: "In the past, 50 bags were sampled for each batch. Now the equipment automatically removes defective products, and the raw material loss rate has been reduced by 15%."
What makes the industry even more excited is the extended application of intelligent production lines. The linkage model recently developed by ply-pack can seamlessly connect the pillow packaging machine with the weighing and coding equipment to achieve full process automation from filling to boxing. At the production site of a quick-frozen glutinous rice ball company in Henan, this system is sending sesame-filled glutinous rice balls into the cold storage at a speed of 300 bags per minute, and the operator only needs to replenish the packaging film at regular intervals.
Solving the dilemma of "not daring to use" for small and medium-sized enterprises
Despite the obvious advantages, some companies still have a wait-and-see attitude towards pillow packaging machines. The owner of a handmade cookie workshop admitted: "We have many product specifications and are worried that the equipment change is too troublesome." In response to this pain point, the ply-pack engineering team has developed a "one-click production change" function-by memorizing the film tension and temperature parameters of different products, it saves at least 40 minutes of debugging time when switching product categories.
After-sales service has also become a focus of competition. Starting this year, ply-pack has added 4 spare parts centers in North China and South China, promising to provide remote diagnosis within 12 hours after equipment failure and arrive at the site within 24 hours. "Last Friday night, the pillow packaging machine of a fish tofu company in Fujian suddenly had an abnormal temperature. Our engineer provided video guidance to replace the heating module, and the production line resumed operation in the early morning." The after-sales manager said while flipping through the duty records.
From bulk weighing to exquisite retail, from manual sampling to full-process quality control, the pillow packaging machine is rewriting the industry rules of food packaging. As domestic manufacturers such as ply-pack continue to increase technological innovation, in the future, perhaps even handmade osmanthus cakes can find a balance between scale and personalization through intelligent packaging.
