Freshpet cuts downtime and increases throughput with automatic splicing
When the engineering team at Freshpet, a manufacturer of fresh, natural pet food, wanted to improve production efficiency on one of their pet food manufacturing and packaging lines, they realized that one of the greatest sources of downtime and therefore lost efficiency was the time it took to change the packaging film rolls when they expired. In this particular line, it took operators at least 6-8 minutes to replace each roll of film, and the hand-spliced film often led to alignment issues and even greater downtime.
Freshpet reached out to the experts at Butler Automatic (butlerautomatic.com), the inventor and global leader in automatic splicing technology, for an automatic splicing solution. The splicer, installed by Butler Automatic in April 2015, has cut downtime to less than one minute per roll change, and Freshpet has ordered a second splicer for their upcoming facility expansion.