In response to food industry demands for an enclosed, hygienic, dust-free solution for opening bags of bulk food, Luxme International has launched an automated, food-grade bag slitter, set to make manual bag dump stations redundant. The Food Grade MiniLux Automatic Bag Slitter adheres to the highest standards of food hygiene. Its sanitary design includes multiple access points for easy cleanability to ensure allergens and pathogens do not make their way into the food chain and also features a number of components approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure the safe processing of food products. Capable of opening up to six 25kg bags per minute, including plastic and kraft paper bags with or without multi-ply plastic inner liners, it is ideally suited for the automatic opening of bulk foods such as dairy products, infant formulas, spices, cake mix, cocoa powder, etc.
An all-in-one conveying, slitting, emptying, integral dust filtering and empty bag compaction unit, the MiniLux improves operator health and safety, reduces the risk of cross contamination and cuts waste.
Occupational asthma – often caused by workers inhaling dusts – is one of the most common work-related lung diseases, accounting for 33% of European food industry compensation cases. By containing dust emissions, the MiniLux helps to safeguard workers handling bulk foods.
Operators must also be aware of the dangers of allergen cross contamination, particularly as segregating the processes that handle raw ingredients might not be possible for small and medium-sized producers. With its ability to control dust emissions and provide good accessibility to machinery components that are in contact with dust particles, the MiniLux is an invaluable weapon in the fight against cross contamination.
In addition, automating the bag opening and emptying operation reduces costs and waste. The optional upgrade of a recovery tumbler – which opens, rotates and tumbles empty bags numerous times to release any remaining product – makes the MiniLux even more cost effective, ensuring 99.9% efficiency depending upon the free-flowing characteristics of the product.
Navam Jagan, President of Luxme International, states: “The prevalence of dust emissions at manual bag opening stations intensifies the health and safety risks in the area, as well as contamination and waste, so it is essential that bag slitter manufacturers work with upstream and downstream equipment suppliers to provide innovative new solutions, such as the Food Grade MiniLux Automatic Bag Slitter, to tackle these issues.”
