During the school holidays last year, I spent time working at my family's manufacturing plant. They have a lot of industrial equipment, and I spent most of my time shadowing the maintenance manager. It was fascinating to see the amount of care and cleaning which goes into making sure all the machines run smoothly. I began this blog as a way to document the different types of maintenance I learned for two reasons. Firstly, because I aim to take over the family business one day, and also to share my knowledge with others who are interested in running their own manufacturing plant.
If you run a food manufacturing factory, investing in air cannons could financially benefit your factory in several ways. Read on to learn how.
They could help you to make long-term savings by enabling you to reduce staff costs
One way in which an air cannon might improve your factory's finances is by enabling you to reduce your staff costs. Blockages in a factory's food transportation chutes happen all the time, and they must be dislodged immediately to ensure that the food processing tasks that require those ingredients can be carried out in a timely manner. As such, without an air cannon, you may need to have at least one staff member monitoring the chutes all day long and may need to involve multiple staff members in the dislodgement of blockages.
In this situation, strategically fitting air cannons in your chute system and in the areas where blockages have developed in the past could allow you to either reduce the number of staff members you have monitoring the chutes and attending to blockages or to eliminate this job entirely, as the air cannon will keep the contents of the chutes moving in a way that will keep the number of blockages that occur very low and will also be able to dislodge blockages with minimal or no involvement from staff by producing a strong air current that will quickly break apart the items that have become stuck so that the chute's contents can get moving again.
They could reduce the quantity of food that get damaged
Putting some air cannons within your factory's chute system could also help you to make long-term savings by reducing the quantity of food that gets damaged. For example, if you make cereal and the loose cereal pieces are sent through your facility's chutes before they are packaged, any blockages that form in these chutes may result in the cereal pieces crumbling and turning into dust (as most cereal flakes and puffs are quite delicate and will break up when compressed).
Having multiple air cannons in these chutes, which keep the cereal pieces moving so that none of them sit in and accumulate in the chutes to the point where they create blockages, could drastically reduce the quantity of cereal that your staff has to throw away. Over time, this could reduce the money you waste on food products that get destroyed before you can sell them to your customers.