Packaging machines for Kochi and Kalamassery

Cold, and what it does to a carton and a tape

A shipper that is packed warm and stored cold does two things people do not expect. The board takes up moisture from the air in the chill room, and the tape adhesive loses tack at low temperature.

A seal that was sound at packing opens in the chill room, and it is found when the pallet is moved rather than when it fails. If your sealing complaints follow the cold chain rather than the season, that is the cause.

Two answers, neither of them a bigger machine. Use a tape rated for the temperature it will actually see, and strap the shipper as well as sealing it — a strap does not care about adhesive.

Board that has softened in a chill room also stacks badly, which is a straps-and-stack-height question rather than a carton-strength one.

Seafood and the primary pack

The pack that touches the product is where a seafood exporter's requirements are strictest, and it is where we have to be clear about what we supply.

Vacuum packaging, filling, capping and labelling machines are Fulcrum catalogue models — supplied, installed and serviced by Fulcrum Infratech Pvt. Ltd. They are not built at our Faridabad works. The strapping, carton sealing, stretch wrapping and material handling machines are the ones we build.

For an export plant that has to document its equipment, that distinction is worth more than any general assurance. Ask your questions with the enquiry and the answers come back against your standard — we will not claim a certification we do not hold.

Spice, and odour that moves

Ground spice carries volatile oils, and they travel. A consignment stored or shipped beside a strongly aromatic product picks up enough to be queried, and it cannot be taken out afterwards.

Film holds an odour in as effectively as it holds a load — which helps when a pallet is all one product and hurts badly when it is not. Do not mix aromatic and neutral goods on a wrapped pallet, whatever the loading plan says.

This is a storage and loading discipline rather than a machine specification, and saying so is more use than selling equipment for it.

Wet floors, and the equipment that has to work on them

A seafood or spice processing floor is washed down, sloped to a drain and wet for most of a shift. Two things follow.

A slope defeats a turntable. A wrapper needs a level circle, and a floor laid to fall towards a channel is not one. The usual answer is a levelled pad rather than a different machine, and it is a civil job to plan before the machine arrives.

Wet floors and wheels do not always agree. A loaded pallet truck that slides is dangerous rather than awkward. Tell us the floor finish and whether it is washed down, and we will say which wheel suits it — and where the machine should stand relative to the wash-down area.

If the machine itself will be hosed, say so. That is a different specification and it is far better raised at the enquiry than discovered by an intermittent fault a month later.

Rubber, and a pack that sticks to itself

Away from the seafood and spice units, a good deal of what moves out of this belt is rubber - sheet, crumb, mats, and moulded parts - and rubber packs unlike anything else on this page.

It sticks to itself under its own weight, and warm sheet stacked tight is a single block by the time it reaches a customer. Interleaving is the answer, not film. Wrapping a stack harder makes the blocking worse rather than better, which is the opposite of the rule that holds for almost every other load.

Where rubber goods are palletised, film is doing one job only: keeping the stack on the pallet. Set the force low, wrap the outside, and leave the layers to the interleaving.

Moulded parts in cartons are ordinary work - seal and strap - with one caution: a warm part packed straight off the press will sweat inside a sealed carton.

Export from a port city

Most of what leaves here goes into a container, and a container standing in a Kochi yard goes through a humidity cycle twice before it is opened.

Film force is the setting that decides whether a load is held or merely covered through that cycle, and it should be set against your own pallets rather than left at a default.

Prices are ex works from Faridabad, with GST and freight quoted separately; it is a long haul and the freight line will show that. Export packing, documentation and freight for your own goods are handled from our end where you want them to be — tell us the destination port and whether you have your own forwarder.