Food Processing - Food Handling

Farbest’s ingredients must not only be top quality but also designed to mix, blend or liquefy according to each customer’s production and quality standards. They must meet strict quality, hygiene, and safety standards including HACCP, as well as critical JIT delivery schedules. This requires flexibility, efficiency, and the right equipment to minimize downtime while achieving needed throughput. For Farbest, this meant choosing the right fine mesh separators to efficiently screen food powders and liquid slurries to ensure final product quality.

“When it comes to flat screening, we need to move large volumes of material through rooms with limited space,” explains Dennis Cowles, Farbest Maintenance Manager. “It’s important to have vibrating screeners that are not too large, not easily damaged, and easy to clean.”

While these requirements may seem simple, they are not always easy to achieve. Some equipment designs are prone to breakdown, such as screen tearing during high-volume operation. Various designs have components that can vibrate loose and enter the product stream below the mesh screen. Cleaning these screens to meet stringent safety and hygiene requirements, such as HACCP, can also be tedious and time consuming without the right equipment.

To avoid these problems, Farbest Brands uses a high-capacity, 36-inch vibratory Compact Screener from Russell Finex (www.russellfinex.com), a Pineville, NC-based food processing equipment manufacturer that supplies filters, separators, and other equipment to improve product quality, enhance productivity, safeguard worker health, and ensure that powders and liquids are contamination-free.

Because screening is a primary operation for ingredient manufacturers like Farbest, Cowles felt the compact screeners would benefit his operation.

“The compact screening equipment, used for scalping (removing larger contaminants), enables us to use more of the production rooms for material, and eliminates the need for a costly conveyor to transport material from one room to another,” Cowles says.

Durability also influenced Cowles’ decision. “Since these use wire mesh screens, we don’t have to worry about the screens tearing or pulling loose like those made of nylon,” he says.

As a food ingredient supplier, hygiene is a priority at Farbest. Chemical and physical tests are regularly conducted in-house, while micro testing is entrusted to certified laboratories.

“Many screeners require a lot of time-consuming tear-downs for cleaning, which detracts from productivity,” Cowles explains. “But the design of this screener is simple, which makes it easy to knock down and clean to our stringent requirements.”

Cowles adds that while some screening equipment has commercial hardware such as nuts and springs exposed to the material screened, the Russell unit does not, which eliminates the risk of hardware vibrating loose to enter the product stream.

In addition to supplying screeners, Russell Finex has served a variety of industries worldwide for over 70 years, with applications in food, chemicals, adhesives, plastisols, paint, coatings, pharmaceuticals, metal powders and ceramics.