Harpak-ULMA has introduced a new application for the Mondini Trave Sinfonia tray-sealing platform, designed explicitly for high-volume ground-meat production. 

The solution delivers a fully automated alternative to conventional tray-sealing methods. Sinfonia can double throughput compared to typical mechanical grind-line tray sealers, increasing output from roughly 120 packs per minute to as high as 200 packs per minute. Sinfonia's software-controlled magnetic-transport architecture delivers this performance advantage by moving trays on independent shuttles with micron-level accuracy. The design eliminates belts, pusher arms and other friction-based components that typically constrain sealing speed, especially in low-oxygen MAP applications.

Although the Sinfonia system was introduced in 2023, this marks its first application for grind-line environments, where tray control, contamination and mechanical indexing have long limited achievable speeds.

"The competitive ceiling for grind-line tray sealing is around 120 ppm. With Sinfonia, we can engineer a 200-ppm grind line — almost a 100% throughput increase," says Carlo Bergonzi, product manager, tray sealing at Harpak-ULMA. "Sinfonia fundamentally changes what's possible in ground-meat tray-sealed packaging. By controlling each tray independently, we remove the mechanical constraints that typically dictate line speed. The result is a faster, cleaner and far more stable tray-sealing process that simply isn't achievable with conventional systems. Given the momentum behind meat-brick formats across major retailers, this application directly addresses the performance conversations we’re hearing from processors.”

The new configuration integrates portioning, dual denesting, retractable conveyor loading and a 14-up sealing array — enabling each processing station to run at its optimal rate without being limited by fixed-pitch conveyor mechanics.