TipTop ice cream perfect packaging

How to ensure that the ice cream produced is packaged correctly?

A recent decision to remove containers from bar codes triggered a challenging food safety concern: How to ensure that the ice creams produced are properly packaged? If not detected, improper packaging will cause product recalls and result in high costs. Together with the risk of food allergy, it constitutes a potential food safety risk. Only the vision system is the only solution. Cognex's partner, ControlVision, provided Auckland and Christchuch with a solution based on Cognex In-Sight vision sensors and PatMax pattern matching.

TipTop is New Zealand's top ice cream company, and its factories in Auckland and Christchurch produce 50 million liters of ice cream each year. In their popular 2L ice cream bucket, for example, TipTop uses a state-of-the-art packaging design with colorful graphics - making the product look as good as it tastes.

accept the challenge

The solution provided must be highly flexible and continuously scalable to meet future graphics, color, and product challenges. In addition, it turns out that environmental conditions are easily changed at light brightness and temperature. One of the advantages of Cognex vision sensors and lighting is that it is designed to handle the harsh corrosive rinsing environment. Finally, there is a necessary condition that personnel with limited sensory experience can independently perform program operations after training and can make simple modifications without compromising reliability and system success.

Focus on details

The essence of this application is the perfect embodiment of the powerful model matching features of Cognex In-Sight & PatMax. Model matching of special patterns provides a trouble-free safety method for verifying the correct packaging of the product. PatMax can allow the product to behave differently in terms of angles and can even handle perspective distortions. PatMax's ability to obtain sufficient detail information not only ensures zero error, but also ensures a negligible rate of failure.

Verify 2L Ice Cream Packs Correctly, Up to 180 Per Minute

Search for the top and side of the container package to find unique, specified features such as product name graphics. With PatMax, its program can memorize and identify the text area and the specified part of the label, as well as its position on the bottle cap. If the match is wrong, the container is automatically rejected and placed in the downline reject station. PatMax's ability to obtain sufficient detail information not only ensures zero error, but also ensures a small percentage of failures.

No more complex parameter configuration is required to ensure ease of use and long-term flexibility. Only a few maintenance personnel use the wizard to complete the required steps and enter a new type template to set up a new product. With the simple software interface provided by ControlVision Recipe Manager software, operators can select products at the start of production.

The simplicity and reliability of the solution enabled Tip Top to maintain high standards without compromising quality.

　

Reproduced from: Cognex Information