Intralox Optimizes Thai Bakery's Bun Cooling by Drastically Reducing Product Damage and Eliminating Unscheduled Downtime

Customer Objectives 

A major bakery in Thailand that makes and sells bakery products for wholesale, retail, fast food, and catering was experiencing issues with their racetrack conveyor. Used for bun cooling, the problematic conveyor consistently experienced belt breakage. This forced strict maintenance and monitoring protocols to catch issues and mitigate the plant’s frequent unscheduled downtime. 

The dated conveyor also required 18 motors to drive its system along with multiple rollers to keep the timing belt tensioned, all of which raised energy costs. In addition, this infeed and cooling system involved six transfer points, further contributing to product damage and loss. The bakery wanted a comprehensive bun-cooling solution that would address all their issues for the long term.

Intralox Execution 

This bakery historically buys spiral equipment from companies based in Japan and Europe, but this time they approached Intralox looking for local service and support—fast. After careful, personalized consultation, the decision was made to replace bakery’s long infeed conveyor with an Intralox Side Drive conveyor, and their racetrack conveyor with an Intralox DirectDrive System spiral. This solution removed the need for multiple motors along the line and upgraded the timing-belt-driven system to positive drive, eliminating product damage, belt breakage, and downtime and reducing cooling time. The installations were completed within one month, well ahead of schedule. 

Results 

The system Intralox put in place solved all of the bakery’s problems. Since installation, there have been no belt breakages, line stoppages, or unplanned downtime, which has lifted their strict maintenance protocols. A 15% reduction in cooling time increased production throughput and product damage was reduced from 20% to 1%.