AUTOMATION

44 Packaging South Asia 2 / February 2014

Sandip Sen

The packaging industry is no longer limited to box making or pouching by thesmall entrepreneur. Increasingly scalable, automated, with sophisticatedcontrol systems and the high-speed convergence of materials and sub-

strates, it produces shelf ready end products for the consumer. Apart from globalbrands, Indian brands are growing with support by investors like Sequoia Capi-tal, Catamaran Investment and Footprint Ventures who are pouring millions of dol-lars into the Indian entrepreneur-driven packaging business. Packaging South Asia visited Haldiram’s Gurgaon plant to talk to its general man-

ager technical, Shivraj Chaudhary, on the automation used for packing 20 metrictonnes of moong dal and another 20 MT of bhujia each day. The packing is done bytwenty-three packaging machines, sixteen 3-side sealing machines for smallpouches and a special purpose high-speed machine for medium-sized 400 grampouches produced for Haldiram by Uflex. In addition there are a pair of VFFS ma-chines each from Ishida, Kawashima, and Mico and a single machine from Yamada.

zSmall pouches form the bulkChaudhary explained that Haldiram has seven factories in north India and five in

Nagpur, run independently by the two Agarwal brothers who sell snacks under thebrand name Haldiram. The third brother sells under the brand name Bikaji fromBikaner Rajasthan. Three years ago, the organized salted snacks market, as perNielsen data, was dominated by western snacks such as potato chips and fingersticks accounting for two thirds of the market – mainly by Pepsico’s Frito Lays andITC foods. Today nearly 60% of the fast-growing ̀ 12,000 crore plus market is dominated by In-

dian snacks produced by a dozen local players apart from Pepsico’s Indian snackswing Lehar Foods. “While Frito Lays producing western snacks is still the biggestmarket player having an installed capacity of 3,000 MT a day of salted snacks, Pep-sico’s Lehar is fast catching up with a production capability of 1,500 MT a day fol-lowed by Balaji at 1,000 MT a day and Haldiram at 500 MT a day,” says Chaudhary.The unorganized salted snacks market is several times bigger and accelerated its

conversion to the organized sector when small retailers such as ‘pan’ and ‘kirana’shops started selling ̀ 10 and ̀ 5 pouches. Indian companies like Balaji, Haldiram,Bikaji, Bikanervala and Prataap Snacks (which received US$ 30 million investorfunds last year) packed their snacks in inexpensive indigenous VFFS machines. Inaddition, many small fringe players entered the snack segment especially after theban of ‘gutka’ and ‘tambakoo’ in several states. Chaudhary added that 60% ofHaldiram’s present production consists of 18 and 36 gram sized pouches priced at ̀5 and 10 respectively. Almost 20% of the company’s volumes are from 200 gram

z Indian snacks rev up the marketplace

Automation and high-speedpackaging gain traction

AUTOMATION

46 Packaging South Asia 2 / February 2014

The industrial Ethernet market is an open source tech-nology platform that offers a cost effective and flexible

network structure, that is user friendly, functional and safewithout any licensing fees or access limitations for thirdparty users. Of all available real-time Ethernet systems, IECcompatible Powerlink has been the longest in the marketoperating over 200,000 machines worldwide in over half adozen industry verticals including packaging.It accepts any topology – star, ring, delta or line, all cabling

such as copper, fibre optic or even wireless, all modular ma-chine structures, quick component integration and easy in-terlinking besides third party interfacing. It is integrated withopen-safety technology, also certified to IEC standards. Anopen source software with no dependence on proprietaryhardware, software or networking, Powerlink supports bothcentralized and decentralized architectures capable of bothlocal and remote control.B&R Automation supports several large industrial clients

using Ethernet in the packaging segment including Krones,SIG, Theegarten Pactec, Oystar, Sidel, Beretta, B&B andKoch and press manufacturers like Heidelberg, manroland,KBA, MBO and Nilpeter. With a large footprint in plastics,metal cutting, high-tech textile manufacturing, and in semi-conductors, B&R conducts training courses for industry pro-fessionals to absorb and adopt the technology platform of theethernet bus at its Pune head office in India and around thecountry.

– Sandip Sen

B&R hooks in with Powerlink and Opensafety

zStandardized industrial Ethernet bus

pouches, 15% from 400 gram pouches,and 5% from 1 kilogram pouches.

zAutomation helps highproductivity Automation starts with the frying and

the bucket conveyors which are part ofthe material handling system. Thebucket conveyor atop the hopper tilts todrop the moong dal or bhujia into thestainless steel hopper after it receives asignal from a level switch on the hopperthat activates the grab bucket. Whilethe frying system and product move-ment automation at Haldiram is provid-ed by Allen Bradley, the packaging ma-chine automation for the Uflex FFS ma-chines is largely from B&R Automation.There are also some packaging ma-chines with Allen Bradley automation

2% Banana chips,Lachha

30%Potato wafers

17% Mix chivra, chanachur

16% Gathia, papri

12% Sev bhujia

11%Extruded snacks

7% Dal

5% N

uts

`12,000 crore Indian and Western salty snacks organ-ized retail market. Source: Industry data

Industrial Ethernet for packaging automation and control

AUTOMATION

2 / February 2014 Packaging South Asia

while Mitsubishi provides automation for the Ishida and Siemens for the Mico FFSmachines. The hopper thereafter empties into the cup filler that is filled to the brim before it

rotates to a position over the bag and drops the moong dal into the pouch. The entireprocess is synchronized with the help of level switches, timers, photo switches andencoders on the disc shaft so that the signals to the feeding servo, the film pullingservo and the sealing servos match. This ensures smooth and continuous opera-tion of pouch forming, material filling and pouch sealing resulting in automatichigh speed operation at the packing end. Automation helps high productivity and seamless operation and Haldiram is now

thinking of using a common protocol to ensure that all automation can be moni-tored centrally and responds to a uniform command controller. The B&R team at theplant confirmed that they have a solution for both centralized as well as decentral-ized operation of automated packaging machines from diverse sources. (See boxitem in the previous page.)

zMajor expansion in the offeringThe salted snacks packaging market is growing at a phenomenal 15 to 20% annu-

ally – especially at the entry level. “The material cost for a `5 pouch works out toaround 60 paise which makes even packaging of small pouches viable as the de-mand in that segment is really high,” says Chaudhury. The Gurgaon unit is planningmajor expansion for moong dal capacity to 3 MT an hour and bhujia capacity to 2MTan hour. This will increase the operational capacity to 60 MT a day from the current40 MT a day based on a single 12-hour shift. In addition, Haldiram plans to increase automation in the food processing or fry-

ing section, though Chaudhary says there are some limitations since automatic fry-ing ovens often do not match with what the Indian tongue and eye wants in terms oftaste and color – and a bit of manual frying ensures consumer acceptability. How-ever, it is likely that the next round of packaging machines would mostly be import-ed to ensure high performance, high speed and trouble-free operation. z

L – R: Ninad Deshpande, marketing executive open technology, B&R; Ritesh Raka,branch manager, B&R Delhi; Shivraj Chaudhary, GM technical, Haldiram; andKrishan Bansal, sales and application engineer, B&R. Photo: PSA

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