Flexible Powder Handling Equipment for Pet Food Manufacturers

The animal nutrition and pet food industry is undergoing massive change and growth. Consumers are now more aware of the importance of good nutrition for their animals and pets, and they want to feel 100% confident about the ingredients used within the products. As they research ways to keep their pets and livestock as healthy as possible, consumers are driving demand for wider choices of animal foods. There are now food products available that meet a variety of nutritional preferences in addition to special health-related requirements.

This rapid market expansion is placing significant pressure on animal nutrition manufacturers. Delivering a wide product portfolio now demands highly flexible operations, with multiple recipe changeovers required on the same line each day, which many producers find challenging to manage efficiently.

In this blog, we’ll look at how pet food manufacturers can address these issues while still keeping up with demand.

How Can Animal Nutrition Manufacturers Increase Productivity?

Animal nutrition manufacturers can improve productivity in their manufacturing process by introducing an IBC-based system. This allows more rapid recipe changeover, reduced manual handling, reduced cleaning time and consistent product quality. Matcon Technology can create highly flexible and efficient workflows, and enable lean manufacturing processes to simplify production, eliminate waste and drive maximum throughput and profitability.

Step 1: Increase Recipe Changeover Speed

All animal nutrition manufacturers aim to reduce wasted time, especially during recipe changeovers. With market trends leaning towards product variety and varied batch sizes, a flexible but efficient manufacturing practice must be followed. The answer to achieving quick changeovers is to decouple the production steps by using Intermediate Bulk Containers (IBCs). With this method, the IBCs are used to move materials between each manufacturing stage, which also increases efficiency by ensuring all key stages of the manufacturing process are in action, working in parallel with one another.

This results in:

• Reduced cost per kg of manufactured product
• Ability to manufacture quickly and efficiently and enabling producing to order
• Decreased inventory for improved cash flow
• Better overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) from fast and independent changeovers

Whilst one IBC is being formulated and filled, another can be blending ingredients and a third IBC can be discharged at the packing stage. Operators are no longer waiting for production processes to complete, resulting in less downtime and better allocated resource. By using parallel processing and lean manufacturing methods, it is possible to significantly improve efficiency and ultimately throughput.

Step 2: Reduce Manual Handling

Manual handling in any production environment is where errors occur and the most production time is lost. Reducing manual handling is key to increasing production.

Using IBCs to increase productivity means that less time is spent moving ingredients around, and reduced human intervention means fewer errors like recipe cross-contamination or incorrect formulation. With IBC-based production, each recipe is formulated and blended in the IBC itself.

The recipe formulation stage can be the point at which errors occur. Filling IBCs, for example, can be streamlined through the use of a Sack Tip Module, where the containers can be quickly and effortlessly filled directly from sacks and instantly weighed correctly, ready for the next manufacturing stage.

Step 3: Take Your Cleaning Offline

The majority of pet food manufacturers still rely on fixed mixers. This often means that while the mixer is cleaned, production stops. With a modular IBC system, the powder recipes are blended within the IBC and, as each IBC is cleaned offline, the blender is not taken out of action. As an IBC completes its journey through the production process, it can be cleaned while the rest of the production line continues. Once clean, the IBC then re-enters the production flow again.

Imagine how production capacity could be increased by reducing the time it takes for recipe changeovers - time gained by not having to disassemble, clean, dry and reassemble a blender. The opportunity for pet food manufacturers is huge. Offline cleaning represents a huge step towards capitalising on these opportunities.

Step 4: Reduce the Amount of Cleaning

IBCs remain sealed and enclosed throughout the manufacturing process; they don’t need to be cleaned between production stages. This saves a significant amount of time, increases product yield and reduces cross contamination. For pet food manufacturers who typically deal with a large variety of recipes daily, this is especially useful. When you consider the downtime saved in every batch, the savings mount up to considerable production efficiencies over a full day and week. When calculated across 12 months, this represents a significant competitive advantage.

Step 5: Improve the Quality and Yield of Each Batch

With the increasing demand for varied recipes and quantities, traditional manufacturing processes often fall short. This leaves pet food manufacturers with stored product inventory, inconsistent batch sizes and uniformity.

Moving to IBC-based manufacturing provides the flexibility to run different batch sizes and delivers precise control over recipe formulation. It supports accurate dosing of vitamins and minerals and maintains even ingredient distribution, helping to ensure consistent product quality.

Step 6: The Potential to Scale

With traditional fixed manufacturing equipment, significant production time is lost as mixers are repeatedly filled, emptied and cleaned between batches. By switching to IBC-based production, this waiting time is removed: once mixing is complete, the IBC moves straight to bag-filling while the next batch is mixed, enabling continuous production.

This shift in technology offers pet food manufacturers the opportunity to run smaller, tailored, flexible batch sizes in parallel, reducing loading, cleaning and discharge times. And the great thing with an agile system like this is that new bins of varying sizes can be added at any time, so scaling to meet market demands doesn’t mean costly factory extensions or refits.

Animal Nutrition Processing and Mixing Equipment

IBCs incorporating Matcon Cone Valve Technology are designed with safety, quality and hygiene in mind. They are designed to enable safe containment, storage, mixing, handling and transportation of ingredients, and to be easily cleaned as they are manufactured with no entrapment areas.

Matcon’s unique Cone Valve technology built into each IBC offers significant benefits over traditional tilting totes or butterfly valve bins. The Cone Valve offers guaranteed, automatic controlled discharge without the risk of segregation of ingredients, which is key when handling complex recipe mixes.

To learn more about how Matcon IBC’s with integrated Cone Valve Technology can improve the processing, storage and transportation of bulk material solids, powders, granules and tablets, read the following articles:

• Containment of ingredients
• Segregation of powders
• Hygiene standards
• Traceability of batches
• Storage of materials
• Staying flexible and maintaining quality
• Cost efficiency during blending

“Our production volume has almost doubled with the Matcon IBC System. We are no longer using the ribbon blenders as the mixing results achieved with the Matcon IBC Blender with High Shear is far better than with the ribbon blenders. Ribbon blending produces a variance of 7% in homogeneity while IBC blending produces a variance of 2%.”

Andrew Gubatan, Plant Manager, FJ Wegon

Discover Our Approach to Effective, Flexible Powder Handling in the Animal Nutrition Industry

Matcon IBCs are ideal animal nutrition processing and mixing equipment that will allow you to adapt to market changes, adhere to regulations, modify the way you operate and create new ways to enhance your production.

In the case study featured below, read how animal nutrition manufacturer, FJ Wegon, increased capacity while delivering tailored orders quickly and efficiently.

If you would like to explore some of the steps discussed in this blog with your particular manufacturing facility in mind, please contact our team. Discover how small changes can make a big difference to manufacturing efficiency and your profitability.