Sargento Foods, the huge cheese producer in Wisconsin, had a reliable, yet old, automatic overhead pallet stretchwrapper.

The company liked the well-used machine's simplicity and efficiency.

It had wrapped more than 500,000 pallets since 1994 without a lick of trouble and no downtime except for regular servicing. The only trouble was Sargento's production had grown.

The pallet wrapping point in the plant had become a bottleneck even with the old stretchwrapper working at full capacity. Buying a second machine like the one it had wasn't possible, moreover. The manufacturer had been bought out by another firm and the overhead model had been phased out.

As Jay Nolte, Sargento's distribution center manager, says, "We found ourselves looking for the same machine, only newer."

One stretchwrapper manufacturer had continued to develop its overhead machines, however. And one of its models solved Sargento's problem.

Stretchwrappers of the overhead type have a machine arm to stretch film around a stationary pallet load rather than wrap from a stationary point while the load spins on a turntable.

Overhead wrapping is important to Sargento, which packs mid-weight cartons. The company's cartons tend to loosen within the pallet or even shift to dangerously uneven weight distributions from the centrifugal force imposed on the pallet load with turntable-type stretchwrappers.

Compared to the older machine that Sargento still operated, the manufacturer's new overhead machine pre-stretches film at a rate of 250%. Sargento's older model was limited to a 150% rate.

For Sargento, which runs its pallet-wrappers 310 days a year for two 10-hour shifts per workday, the costs savings brought by increased pre-stretching is considerable.

A basic goal behind pallet wrapping is to use less material. Film is sold by the pound, so the more wraps one can get out of a pound, the more one saves.

The stretch film that Sargento uses is 70-gauge on a 30-inch carriage, and is recyclable. Other features of the wrapper include the capability to wrap two-high pallets, a mechanism to eliminate film tails, and circuitry within the machine to ensure efficient wrapping even when temperatures are below 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sargento's new wrapper system includes a 25-foot outfeed conveyor to accommodate more wrapped loads. If this conveyor were shorter, pallets would accumulate on the floor, taking up space, until a forklift arrived to get them out of the way. But the longer conveyor allows up to three forklifts to side-unload the wrapped pallets from the conveyor.

The wrapper's onboard PC communicates with Sargento's palletizer and the company's conveying system to keep production bottleneck-free. "We get a real nice productivity out of the system," says Nolte. "Our speed's really improved."

"It's just a great wrapper. It feels like we got the best of everything, the old and the new," he adds.

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