Chye Choon recently launched their PEACOCK Brand Quick-serve instant vermicelli in 6 exciting Asian flavours. Savvy consumers will face a tough choice between local favourites - Satay Beehoon, Mee Siam, Chicken Curry and traditional Nonya Laksa, as well as Malay Ayam Soto and Thai Tom Yam.

It takes all of 3 minutes to serve up mouth-watering meal.

Each serving is packaged in a classy outer foil packaging. Open your preferred flavour… and inside you will find a pouch of pre-cooked recipe gravy and a serving of vermicelli. A thoughtful touch is that each portion of vermicelli is individually packed in an additional transparent pillow-pack for added freshness and hygiene.  The result is that each pack enjoys a shelf-life of 24 months.

In selecting the right packaging machine, Executive Director - Mr Jimmy Soh’s, specific requirement was for ONE versatile flow-wrapper machine capable of packing the outer display wrapper and well as the inner-packaging for the individually-wrapped vermicelli. He also preferred if the same machine could be used to pack his traditional 300g vermicelli family pack. This was critical because it was not possible to modify his current plant layout to create additional space to accommodate more than one packing machine.

This proved to be a challenge as the one machine to pack the smaller instant vermicelli range could not handle the bulky 300g pack as the difference in product dimension was too great. In the end, we opted to adopt our large model flow-wrapper the DXD-580 built to accommodate the bulkier 300g family pack, but equipped with an additional adjustable former-changeover kit to handle the 2 smaller packages. Once the heaters are cooled down, change-over of size takes just 15-20 minutes.

While the standard machine is designed to run between 70-150 ppm (packs per minute), operator hand-loading of fragile vermicelli onto the 3 metre in-feed conveyor meant they could realistically run at between 25 to 45 ppm. However, running at such slow speed for prolonged periods was not advisable as it could cause the motor to burn-out prematurely. To resolve this problem, we customised the machine by adding on a gear reducer to enable the machine to adopt a slower, but practical operating speed.

As Chye Choon prepares to kick off with a marketing campaign for Peacock instant meals, Mr Soh expects production may have to be cranked up quickly in the near future to meet higher sales orders. Fortunately, at Tantraco, we are confident of meeting this challenge head-on with our 4-hour technical response team, and of course our work horse machine – the DXD-580 flow wrapper which is more than ready to take on 2 production shift if necessary.

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