A pet-food manufacturer required a higher-capacity and repeatable alternative to manually opening bags of ingredients. The existing process handled 10kg, 16kg and 25kg sacks and was creating production bottlenecks, inefficiencies and additional labour costs as demand increased.

The ingredients included potato starch, caster sugar, ground linseed, limestone, dark malt, chickpea, brown rice, oat and carob flours, ground oats, dextrose monohydrate, skimmed milk powder, poultry meal and meat meal.

Entecon and the customer developed a system intended to improve material handling and dust containment, support clean GMP operation, achieve a production capacity of 300 sacks per hour, reduce manual labour and integrate with the existing production line.

The resulting Automatic Sack Opener handles bags from 10kg to 25kg and incorporates a dust-extraction unit for contained operation, a 1.5-metre infeed belt conveyor, PLC controls and an HMI touchscreen that can be positioned

According to the case study, the installation reduced bag-opening time by 80% and manual intervention by 50%. It also reduced spillage and dust dispersion, supporting food-manufacturing hygiene standards, while streamlining material flow to enable more continuous production.