Flour miller benefits 3 ways with LOCK N’ POP

When one of the largest flour milling companies in the US approached LOCK N’ POP about working with it to test the feasibility of shipping 50lb bags of milled product with no stretch wrap to solve a quality issue LOCK N’ POP’s quick response was ‘Yes, we can!’ It was an easy reply given our long history of doing just that for customers in the flour milling, animal feed and food ingredient market segments.

Problem

The quality problem identified was entrapped moisture causing mold and insect development. This is caused because milled product is slightly warm when it is packed and shrouding the product with plastic film for unitizing causes condensation to develop. Given the stretch wrap this moisture has no way to dry or escape. The issue is most problematic in the cold months when the combination of warm product and cold storage temperatures increases the amount of condensation.

Action

A series of test shipments, both by truck and rail, were conducted over several months at one of the customer’s prime facilities.

Results

The tests resulted in THREE excellent reasons why the LOCK N’ POP solution was chosen to solve the problem.

• First, with our solution, airflow between the bags was preserved allowing the product to adapt to the ambient temperature and preventing condensation. This solved the quality problem and added to the shelf life of the product.
• The second benefit was that there was no evidence of load shifting, tier to tier or load to slip sheet, even in the more demanding rail shipping environment.
• The third benefit of the LOCK N’ POP solution was the overall cost reduction for unitizing materials. After amortizing the cost of the LOCK N’ POP application equipment over the first year’s production unitizing costs was reduced by 33%. After the first year these savings rose to 50% as compared to using stretch film.

LOCK N’ POP supplies its products to several major millers in the US and world-wide. These include bay State Milling, Horizon Milling and ADM. Click here for a case study at Rock Mountain Flour.