Josh Becker has enjoyed a long and successful career in food manufacturing, serving the industry for nearly 28 years. Looking back, he said he was inspired to join the industry in part because of his father. 

“My father worked for a printing company in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and I remember one time he was selected to attend an FAT (factory acceptance test) on a new printing press in Heidelberg, Germany,” he explained. “I just recall how fascinating it was for his job to send him to Germany, learn about the new machine and then support that machine once it arrived at their factory. I believe that was a key instance to inspire me to consider a career in manufacturing.”

Becker graduated from Penn State University with a degree in chemical engineering. Since then, he’s held many positions across the industry, including packaging and processing supervisor at Frito-Lay, Plano, Texas; packaging equipment design engineer and maintenance manager at Kraft Foods, Chicago; project engineer/manager at George Weston Bakeries (now part of Bimbo Bakeries USA, Horsham, Pa.) and senior manager of packaging systems at The Hershey Co., Hershey, Pa. Today, Becker serves as bakery and confectionary segment manager for Harpak-Ulma.

Becker takes pride in numerous accomplishments over the course of his career. These include testing and pursuing the use of extrusion dividing for muffin-style doughs at George Weston, as well as transitioning Hershey’s chocolate packaged candy from flat pillow bags to the stand-up pouches used today.

“This was a game changer at retail to drive consumers to the candy aisle with a visually appealing shopping experience,” he said.

At Harpak-Ulma, Becker is most proud of elevating the company’s status within a competitive packaging industry. 

“We’ve been able to grow brand awareness and recognition in a short time by being present and active,” he said.

Becker said there’s no greater feeling than meeting with a customer, discussing their operational challenges and executing a solution to help overcome them. 

“When you can see a product and package come to life from scratch, knowing you had a part in that is a really good feeling,” he said.

Increasing line efficiency is one of the biggest challenges the industry faces today, especially as baking companies and their suppliers look to become more sustainable. 

“Do more with less. Higher line efficiency means less waste and better utilization of labor in the factory,” he said. “It is a challenging feat because it means taking a risk sometimes with new machinery. Our customers often struggle with the right technical labor, so we need to do what we can to minimize or change what technical labor looks like, machines that are easier to understand and operate, or even self-diagnosing machines that can be smarter and take on the role of a trained technician.”

Here, Becker shares how Harpak-Ulma’s latest flow wrapper can help drive efficiencies for bakers.

What challenges do bakers face today when attempting to bolster the speed or efficiency of their packaging line?

First, higher speed does not always mean more output. Before we start talking about output or efficiency, I want to talk about the product and the materials (or easier said, the inputs to a packaging line). The incoming materials (film, corrugated) need to be of the right specification. This sometimes is overlooked and can be a big challenge to the baker when trying to bolster line speed with new equipment. Also, the product itself can have an impact. Deciding to run the front of a bakery line a few cuts per minute more to get more speed may seem great, but are the product characteristics becoming too much of a variable that will impact the efficiency and speed of the packaging line? Take those challenges into consideration first.    

Other challenges that will exist for bakers include whether space is available for new equipment needed to gain speed. Increasing speed and efficiency may mean automation, which takes labor off the line and moves them to other roles in the bakery, so you must also consider what unwritten roles those employees were doing on the line before automation. They may have been manually packing the product, but they could have also been the last line of quality inspection before packaging.  With automation, that labor is not there, so other considerations like a quality control vision inspection system may now be necessary. 

How does the FR400 Twin High Speed Flow Wrapper help bakers solve some of these challenges?

First, the machine is essentially two flow wrapping machines in the same frame footprint of one machine, so capacity is already doubled with basically no additional usage of space. This increases total output capacity and as a fully automated system can reduce the labor requirements for an operation. The infeed also has a few product quality inspection features for product length/width to eliminate suspect products from the line.   

What other benefits does this flow wrapper provide? What speeds can it achieve?

Another benefit of this machine is each lane can operate independently of the other. The FR400’s electrical panel is raised above the system, allowing easy access to all panels and machine guards from the nonoperational side. Technicians can safely work on the outside lane while, at the same time, producers maintain steady, high-speed production on the inside without resorting to costly system downtime. Other than a shared frame and HMI, they are independently controlled and operated machines.  

Each lane of the machine can run up to 700 packages per minute (ppm) or 70 meters of film per minute. The total FR400 Twin machine is now up to 1,400 ppm. 

How does this flow wrapper help bakers save on labor?

This really depends on how the baker’s current packaging line is set up today. If the baker operates on a model of one operator per packaging line, then this twin can be treated as one packaging line with double the output with the same operator.  If you really have a higher speed operation, the opportunity exists to have two Twin FR400s in a mirrored configuration and potentially only still need one operator. That is a significant amount of production with minimal labor required.  

Which bakery applications is this flow wrapper suited for? What potential adjustments are there for bakers based on product type?

This is a machine best suited for individually wrapped products with snack bars, granola bars, cereal bars and protein bars being prime candidates. Donuts, muffins, bagels and other small cakes and croissants are also ideal products when you need multiple machines to handle the output.  The machine infeed guides can be adjusted to accept products of different widths as well as differing product lengths. These adjustments can easily be made without the use of tools and by recipe selection in the HMI.  

What adjustments may bakers need to make when incorporating a new packaging system? How do you help them through this process?

The first thing to take into consideration when incorporating a new packaging system is how the product is being received and where the product needs to go after primary packaging. With new high-speed automation, the feeding of the products may need to be replaced to maximize the benefit of the new system. We can help with that as we also build and supply our own product distribution and feeding systems.  

The baker also needs to ask what benefits they’re looking for in their new packaging system. Is it labor reduction, capacity or output improvement, or a new product with a new packaging format? These are all things that are discussed on each and every project. The best packaging system is one that delivers on all the key strategies that the baker is looking to accomplish.