Aussie icon the Peanut Van recently installed a semi-automatic line to manage product feeding, dosing and bagging of its famous jumbo-peanuts and help it manage a new national distribution agreement with IGA Foodland.
The Peanut Van retails tonnes of fresh, crunchy jumbo-peanuts from its vans and via retailers, and also provides a mail-order service, in addition to attracting tourists to Queensland.
The company sources its jumbo-sized peanuts from the Peanut Company of Australia (PCA), the central processor for Kingaroy’s peanut farmers.
These are then hand-cooked and flavoured in weekly batches before packing them into air-tight bags.
The company, which is one of Kingaroy’s bestknown tourist attractions, was established in 1969, and in late 2016, production looked set to soar after the company secured a new national distribution agreement with IGA Foodland.
However, the packaging line machinery that the company was using was causing problems for its owners and operators. Managing director Rob Patch described the equipment as “really temperamental.”
It would breakdown when they most depended on it, such as when they had big orders to process. One day it might process a tonne of peanuts, and the next day only 15kg.
“Our reputation as being a reliable supplier to our customers was at risk. We had no control. We’d walk onto the shop floor in the morning with a plan to process a certain amount of product, yet be unsure that we’d be able to achieve that. We were all wondering how much production time we’d burn that day. Moreover, nobody could tell the company how to resolve the issues," Patch says.
"We had lost confidence in our production capabilities,” he says. “We lived on tenterhooks.”
These issues were compounded, he says, by the fact that the machinery was a nightmare to wash down. The Peanut Van was processing twenty two flavours on the same line.
To prevent cross-contamination of allergens contained within the ingredients, the machinery had to be washed down on a relatively frequent basis.
The problem was that it took three people twelve hours to dissemble the machinery and wash it down. “We had to resolve the problems or get out of business,” Patch says.
So The Peanut Van decided to go out to the marketplace to seek a solution and settled on DiverseCo company AccuPak, a systems integrator of dosing/weighing, packaging, palletising equipment and product inspection systems, to come up with the answers.
To kick things off, an AccuPak business analyst and engineer reviewed The Peanut Van’s production facilities, processes and packaging line requirement.
The company then set about to design a robust, reliable and flexible turnkey solution that would enable The Peanut Van to acquire new operational capabilities and set new benchmarks.
