SunAura Ships 14-Head Multihead Weigher with Servo Flow Wrapper to German Organic Snack Producer

Qingdao, China — SunAura Machinery has shipped and FAT-tested a compact weighing-and-wrapping line to an organic snack producer in Germany, pairing a 14-head multihead weigher with a servo horizontal flow wrapper for its muesli-cluster and dried-fruit mix range. The decision to specify 14 heads — rather than the customer’s initial 10-head budget option or a top-end 18-head unit — was made after SunAura’s engineering team ran the customer’s own samples on a trial bench and measured real cycle times and giveaway weight.

Why 14 Heads, Not 10 or 18

The customer initially priced a 10-head weigher, drawn by the lower purchase price. Its product, however, is a mixed muesli cluster: dry oats and nuts mixed with lightly oiled, sticky dried-fruit pieces. On the test bench, the 10-head unit could find a near-target combination only by waiting for the next bucket to refill, which dragged effective speed to around 38 packs per minute against the customer’s 60 ppm requirement on 75 g bags. The sticky fruit pieces also sat unevenly on standard straight buckets, loosening average weight.

A 18-head unit would have hit the accuracy and speed target comfortably, but the customer’s line tops out at 60-70 ppm and its product is mid-value — the tighter ±0.2% accuracy of an 18-head platform was accuracy the customer would never use, at a roughly 40% price premium. The 14-head platform sat exactly on the requirement: it reached 65-70 ppm on the customer’s samples, held target weight within the requested tolerance, and used coated, faster-opening buckets to handle the oily dried-fruit pieces without hang-up.

What the Line Includes

The delivered package combines three core stations: a 14-head multihead weigher with coated buckets and timed-vibration feed, a servo-driven horizontal flow wrapper for pillow packs, and a discharge conveyor that bridges the two and keeps product drop gentle to protect the clusters. Controls share a single PLC so operator changeover, recipe recall, and throughput read-outs run from one HMI. The wrapper handles the customer’s three bag formats (40 g, 75 g, 150 g) with tool-less changeover, and the weigher stores a separate recipe per SKU.

Because the product is organic and exported to the EU, all product-contact parts are 304 stainless and food-grade polymer, and the line ships with the matching CE conformity documentation, operating manual, and FAT report — the audit pack the customer’s importer requested before release.

The customer runs three SKUs across two pack formats on the same line, so changeover speed was a deciding factor. The servo wrapper uses tool-less film-roll change and automatic film-centering, and the weigher’s recipe memory recalls the target weight, vibration intensity, and bucket timing per SKU in one HMI selection. The customer measured under 15 minutes between a 40 g bag run and a 150 g bag run during the FAT — short enough to protect small-batch organic production economics, where short runs and frequent changeovers are the norm rather than the exception.

Who This Configuration Fits — and Who It Does Not

This 14-head-plus-servo-wrapper combination is the right fit for producers running 40-80 packs per minute on mixed or lightly sticky dry products — muesli and granola, trail mix, dried fruit, roasted nuts, small frozen berries, confectionery with a coating. It deliberately stops short of 18 heads, so buyers already planning 90+ ppm twin-lane lines, or packing high-value product where ±0.2% giveaway tolerance is required, should step up to the higher-head platform.

Conversely, buyers running under 40 ppm on purely free-flowing dry product do not need this unit: a 10-head platform paired with a smaller flow wrapper delivers the same result at lower capital cost and a smaller footprint. SunAura specifies the weigher-to-wrapper pair as one system — a 70-ppm weigher feeding a 40-ppm wrapper is an expensive queue, and quoting them separately is how mismatched lines get bought.

Testing Before Shipment

Before crating, the customer’s own samples ran on the assembled line for a sustained factory acceptance test. SunAura sent video, measured packs-per-minute across all three bag formats, and the average giveaway weight, so the customer could confirm the line met its requirement before freight. Installation, remote commissioning, and operator training follow the standard after-sales service scope.

More on the weighing-and-wrapping range: see the multihead weigher and pillow packaging machine pages, compare complete packaging lines, and browse recent deliveries in news.