Eding Brothers Celery Farm Chooses Mosca Strapper to Ensure Freshness
As nutritional science increasingly emphasizes the benefits of incorporating more fresh fruits and vegetables into the American Diet, produce growers feel the need to keep up with technology in getting their fresh products to market faster and more efficiently.
Eding Brothers Celery Farm in Hamilton, Michigan is no exception. A celery grower since the 1930’s, the family-run company follows a planting sequence that runs from early April to early July and harvests and packages from July through October. Their 160 acres of celery plantings provides the majority of company income, so, when the crop is ready to harvest, they want as much reliability as possible in their packing and shipping process.
The process is straightforward. It starts with tractors pulling trailers of freshly harvested celery into the packing shed, where it is washed, trimmed, sorted, in some cases bagged, and packed into waxed cartons. The 60 pound, over-packed boxes are then strapped and stacked on pallets for shipment. With peak outputs of about 2,000 boxes per day, production pressure is high and downtime is not tolerated.
In the fall of 2015, Jeff Eding, one of the company owners, decided he needed a new strapper to replace an old machine that he was trying to nurse through a final season. After trials with multiple units from Mosca and other manufacturers, Eding decided to follow the recommendation of his packaging supplies distributor, Bravo Systems from nearby Battle Creek, and purchase a Mosca ROMS4/1 Side Seal Strapping Machine. The Mosca machine came recommended from other local companies including several well-known office furniture manufacturers.
The operator controlled ROMS Series and its fully-automatic cousin TRS have adjustable strap positioning features, adjustable conveyor table heights and a compact footprint. The fully enclosed strap track requires only a 5” conveyor gap making both models easy to install in tight spaces. The ROMS/TRS Series feature a highly refined strapping head with automatic strap feeding for fast coil loading; quick, tool-less cleaning with its quick-release internal strap guides; and brushless DC motor technology for precise operational control and minimal maintenance needs.
While Mosca makes a full range of strappers ranging from semi-automatic to operatorless systems, Eding Brothers chose the powder-coat painted side-seal model because it is relatively unaffected by water that may drip from the just washed celery and is convenient for operators to guide boxes into the strapping position, as well as remove them from the conveyor for stacking on pallets. In addition, the electronically controlled tensioning system on the Mosca strapper provides highly consistent strap tension strap-to-strap which helps level the overfilled boxes making for more stable pallet loads. For very moist conditions, the ROMS/TRS Series are available in stainless steel with Sonixs ultrasonic sealers.
The machine was installed in early September and was used during the final six weeks of the 2015 packing season. Jeff Eding, who does much of the service work on the strapping equipment himself, comments that the machine met his reliability expectations during those hectic weeks and that its significantly faster cycle speed was a benefit to throughput while giving operators time to do tasks beyond what they had been able to do with the older, slower machine. He also mentioned that when minor issues surfaced during the early days following the installation, he was able to get effective help from EAM-Mosca’s telephone support line and was able to avoid dreaded downtime.
Eding is complimentary about the performance of his Mosca bander to-date, and he looks forward to testing its performance over the full season this year. He notes that the operation applies about 250,000 straps per year and he expects the machine to stand up to this level of use. When he was informed that other machines of this design, when well maintained, have had operating lives of as much as 25 million cycles, or the equivalent of 100 celery packing seasons, he smiled and acknowledged that, in his eyes at least, that would be satisfactory.
EAM-Mosca Corporation provides high-performance strapping system solutions to a variety of industries, including food, graphic arts, mailing, fulfillment, logistics, corrugated, wood, and other industrial or consumer goods. We combine innovative equipment with strapping materials manufactured to maximize machine performance and customer support programs that help our customers to meet their performance and productivity goals.
To learn more about any of EAM-Mosca’s other productivity enhancing strapping systems, please call us at 800-456-3420, or email us at info@eammosca.com. You can also connect with EAM-Mosca on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/EAMMoscaCorp), Twitter (www.twitter.com/EAMMoscaCorp), and Facebook and LinkedIn via the links above.