Walking into the packaging workshop of a self-heating food company in Shanghai, two brand-new production lines are spitting out rice sets at a speed of nearly 100 bags per minute. On the assembly line, square lunch boxes of different specifications are accurately bagged, and the sauce packs and tableware are combined tightly. "This is our newly introduced instant food packaging machine, which completely solves the problem of mixed packaging." The workshop director pointed to the running equipment and said.
Such scenes are being replicated in the fast food industry at an accelerated pace. With the explosive growth of sub-categories such as pre-prepared dishes and instant hot pots, traditional packaging equipment has been unable to cope with the needs of multi-material combinations and multi-form packaging. The reporter saw at the Ply-Pack factory that technicians were debugging a new generation of instant food packaging machines. Its original "three-axis linkage" mechanism can handle the coordinated bagging of staple food packages, seasoning packages and tableware at the same time. "The self-heating foods on the market generally contain 5-7 independent packages. Our equipment can achieve zero missing and zero misalignment." The head of R&D said while showing the test samples that had just come off the line.
Intelligent upgrades have become the core driving force of this packaging revolution. In the assembly workshop of Ply-Pack, engineers are customizing instant food packaging machines for a certain instant noodle company. The visual inspection system equipped with the equipment can capture the sealing quality in real time. "Traditional manual sampling can check up to 200 bags per hour, and now the equipment is conducting 360-degree inspections every second." The project leader revealed that after the equipment is put into production, it is expected to reduce the loss of the packaging link by more than 30%.
Flexible production capacity is another major breakthrough direction. The reporter noticed that the instant food packaging machine under trial operation is compatible with a variety of specifications from 200g bagged snail noodles to 1.5kg family sharing packages. "Switching packaging is as easy as changing the theme of a smartphone." The operator demonstrated the conversion process from cup packaging to box packaging on site, and the entire adjustment process was completed within 15 minutes. This flexibility coincides with the current operating characteristics of the fast food industry, which is "small batches and multiple hits".
Maintenance convenience has become a new focus for buyers. Ply-Pack's latest fast food packaging machine is equipped with a self-diagnosis system, and the early warning prompts on the operation interface are clear and easy to understand. The equipment supervisor of a freeze-dried food company in North China reported: "When the material jammed last week, the system directly popped up a three-dimensional decomposition diagram, and the fault was eliminated in ten minutes following the instructions." This "fool-proof" operation and maintenance design significantly reduces the company's dependence on technicians.
Against the background of accelerated iteration of packaging materials, equipment compatibility has ushered in new challenges. The reporter learned that Ply-Pack's fast food packaging machine has overcome the packaging difficulties of degradable materials and has been successfully applied to a certain online celebrity light food brand. "The new environmentally friendly bag material is softer, and traditional equipment will deviate after grabbing ten bags. Now it can still maintain millimeter-level accuracy after working continuously for eight hours." The quality director pointed to the data on the test report and introduced.
Industry observers pointed out that the intelligent upgrade of fast food packaging machines is reconstructing production logic. In the past, companies needed to configure multiple dedicated production lines to deal with different categories, but now a single device can achieve multi-form switching. The production director of a certain OEM company did some calculations: "In the past, it took three lines to accept orders from five different customers, but now two flexible production lines can handle it, and the equipment utilization rate has doubled directly." Standing in the whole machine test area of Ply-Pack, the reporter witnessed the "extreme challenge" of the fast food packaging machine-from the palm-sized sauce package to the half-person-high family gift box, the equipment completed the switching test of seven specifications in half an hour. The head of the technical team admitted: "Now customers' requirements are becoming more and more 'demanding'. Just last week, a customer required that the equipment must be able to handle twelve special-shaped packages, which has raised a new topic for our mechanical design." As the "stay-at-home economy" continues to heat up, the demand for intelligent packaging equipment in the fast food industry has shown a blowout trend. Ply-Pack's marketing department revealed that the number of orders for fast food packaging machines has increased by more than 150% year-on-year since the beginning of this year, of which models with both intelligent and flexible features accounted for more than 80%. In this silent packaging revolution, companies that are the first to complete production line upgrades are quietly building their own moats.
