Ishida has announced receiving award recognition for its recently introduced QX-500 tray sealer, as it won the Innovative Packaging Machinery category at this year’s PPMA Awards, which are catered towards celebrating UK packaging equipment design and manufacturing.
The Innovative Packaging Machinery award recognises businesses who have engineered or adopted a solution leading to significant productivity improvement and/or cost reductions.
A significant aspect of the tray sealer’s development, the company said, is that it was created as a result of feedback given by its global customers and partners. Having discussed with them, Ishida found a need for a compact tray sealer that can fit easily into new and existing packing lines, offers good seal quality and high throughput, all while helping companies to meet their sustainability targets.
The QX-500 delivers a 66% increase in cycle speed, a 44% reduction in weight, a 46% reduction in size and a 50% reduction in energy consumption. All of this translates to delivering consistently high-quality seals, the reduction of waste and an increase in productivity.
To meet the different requirements of products and pack formats, the tray sealer offers a variety of sealing options – seal only, gas flushing, MAP, stretch film and skinpack – across a wide variety of tray designs and materials, including plastic, board and recyclable formats. The QX-500 is also available with integrated film coding, gas mixing and integrated vacuum system.
With customers reporting that available factory space is a major challenge, the design of the QX-500 focused on driving down the size and weight of all major sub-systems of the tray sealer to deliver high performance using a minimum machine footprint. This allows companies to realise a high ROI working with limited floor space.
The design of the QX-500 also focused on maximising quality and convenience for its consumers. Ishida’s new ‘IntelliSeal’ technology (patent pending) ensures excellent seal integrity for extended shelf life while providing ease of opening. The system constantly measures the sealing force of the tray sealer to optimise sealing pressure, temperature and time for each cycle. This enables the QX-500 to adapt itself to different packaging formats.
“The winning of the PPMA Award is an outstanding achievement and a fitting tribute to everyone who worked on the development of this game-changing tray sealer,” said Steve Jones, Marketing Director at Ishida Europe. “Understanding and responding to customer needs and concerns has always been central to Ishida’s new product development programmes. The positive response we have received to the launch of the QX-500 demonstrates the value of this approach and the Innovative Packaging Machinery Award is the perfect conclusion to this hugely successful project.”
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