Flexco’s food grade cleaners offer easy to use conveyor belt solutions.
Ryan Jackson, product manager for Flexco’s food grade cleaners, detailed the three food grade cleaners and how each differentiates from the other, without sacrificing on quality of outcome.
“Right now, we offer three food grade cleaners. We have our food grade primary, food grade primary with external spring, and our food grade secondary,” he said.
Flexco’s food grade cleaners are designed to address, and mitigate, the risks associated with carry back on conveyor belts.
“Belted conveyors in food processing have issues with carry back, and that is true in proteins, confectionary and produce; basically all food processing industries,” said Jackson
“The carry back can cause waste, unplanned downtime and extra clean-up.
“The line can also be completely shut down if food ends up somewhere it shouldn’t be for sanitation reasons, so it results in product loss too.
“Any of the carry back that goes underneath the system rather than to the next process in the line is wasted product, wasteful from both an environmental and profit standpoint.”
Flexco food grade cleaners offer a solution for this common carry back issue experienced right across the food and beverage manufacturing industry.
“Making sure that as much of that food is being scraped off the belt as possible is essential; so that it goes into the next step and does not cause issues,” added Jackson.
“Flexco’s UHMW blades are a catch all and work in a variety of applications, especially big and chunky proteins. They’re also great for confectionary
“For example, if you have a belt with chocolate and that chocolate gets dried on the belt the harder UHMW does a great job scraping that dried chocolate off the belt.”
The food grade cleaners also work well when it comes to protein processing, which present other issues.
“Proteins have a lot of fatty or oily product on the belt which need to be scraped, or in a cracker baking application where a lot of oil is going to stick to the belt and drip onto the floor,” said Jackson.
“There is usually a place where the customer wants to oil scraped too and that is where our softer blade comes in. It acts like a squeegee and helps get that oily and fatty substance off the belt.”
Jackson said carry back and improved throughput were two areas that Flexco received the most queries about.
“These processes have the most plant metrics attached to them for plant managers or the safety manager, whoever, typically what we hear is someone in that plant has a critical metric tied to throughput, maintenance, and downtime,” he added
The added value of addressing carry back issues is one of the defining advantages of Flexco’s food grade cleaners, especially around return on investment for customers.
“We have had great success with customers by demonstrating the value that the additional throughput our cleaners can help them achieve and it is not out of the realm of possibility for us to help them get 50 per cent improvement to their throughput,” said Jackson.
“What I mean by that is if they are seeing 10kg an hour is being wasted we can help cut that waste by 50 per cent or more in certain applications. It shows a great return on investment in a matter of weeks rather than months or years.”
Jackson said the three different food grade cleaners meant Flexco had a solution for many conveyancing processing systems in the food and beverage industry.
“The three different models we offer are there to provide a solution for various applications,” he said
“The two primary cleaners are intended to be mounted right at the head pulley and depending on the material being conveyed there are levels of cleaning requirements based on different industries and based on space you may want to use the internal spring scraper to keep a low profile.”
However, some industries prefer to employ the FGP-ES (External Spring) scraper into processes.
“The FGP-ES can be mounted at the head pulley position with the external spring. It takes up more space but is easier to clean and is designed with large gaps in the spring, so it is easy to do CIP or be easily removed and sprayed down,” said Jackson.
“Meanwhile, the secondary cleaner can be mounted in that primary position or in a secondary position behind the pulley, on the underside.”
The way the secondary cleaner is designed with a mount shaft and bracket with adjustable spring arms gives it the most flexibility in positioning of all three cleaners.
“It can go in the primary or secondary position and those swing arms can be adjusted so the blade has a more or less aggressive angle depending on the different product and application needs,” said Jackson.
Flexco’s food grade cleaners have a string of other advantages for customers in the food and beverage space and the Flexco team prides itself on in-depth consultation to ensure customers get the best results for its food conveyance and processing.