The Omega 800 is a combination of a flow pack packaging method with a vacuum chamber.
Packs are shaped directly from a plastic reel and adapt to the product. The machine automatically “reads” and “calculates” each product’ size avoiding the waste of film.
Cost saving
Claudio Barbera, area manager at Colimatic, said flexibility is important for industry.
“Unique is the cost saving this machine allows as you don’t have any kind of waste of film because it automatically detects the length of the product and is able to pack different sizes of product, lengths and shapes,” he told FoodProductionDaily.
“It is typically for meat because it is ideal for pork legs, long bars of whole cuts before they are sliced but it can be for any kind of product.
“Any kind of sealable materials can be run on the machine, it can be plastic, aluminium, it really depends on the application our partners are looking for.”
Barbera said the machine was more focussed on saving film than throughput.
“If you look at this machine you can see the vacuum chamber is pretty long so you cannot expect a fast machine, you need time to suck the oxygen out of the chamber so that’s why it is not for high throughput,” he said.
“For meat production you can reach up to three or four cycles per minute which is a lot if you look at the dimensions so depending on the product size you can expect six packages per minute.”
Colimatic Group market reach
The company was founded in 1973 it has Colimatic USA, Sweden, Argentina and partners globally.
It produces thermoformers and tray sealers from medium to high capacity with food making up around 56% of business with the rest being medical.
As well as meat, the firm is also active in sectors including dairy, pasta, fruit and veg and bakery.
“Before this machine the customers had a waste of film because they had to cut their materials or maybe they were using big bags for possibly a small product so you can imagine how much plastic was around the product and they had to do it manually also so labour costs can be reduced,” said Barbera.
“This machine is ideal for cold cut producers, very often they have a factory producing long bars of cooked ham for example and then they have to transport this product to another factory so for logistics also it allows optimisation.”
We spoke to Colimatic at IPACK-IMA 2015, which was visited by 108,000 professionals, one-fourth of which came from outside Italy.
Participants came from 133 countries, with increasing numbers from Asia (+60%), North America (+54%), Central and Latin America (+40%) and from Africa (+14%) and Europe (+15%).