It's in the can
Soup maker installs 12 cooker-coolers on a new canning line.
For four generations, Morgan Foods has been canning soups, beef products and sauces in its Austin, IN, manufacturing facility. And, over the past 15 years, the company has been successfully doing it via 12 Chester-Jensen kettles and tanks. Based on the reliability of the equipment, the company turned to Chester-Jensen once again when it wanted to add a new canning line in the spring of 2004.
"We were expanding and needed to add a new high-speed filling line that would accommodate 1,200 cans per minute," says Cory Lytle, project engineering manager with Morgan Foods. "This wasn't going to be a typical new filling line that required just a few kettles here and there. We needed kettles, holding tanks, a massive mixing station and a few other pieces of equipment on the line. We explained the product we would be producing on the new line, the different locations where product would be running and the tanks that would be required.
"After our discussion, Chester-Jensen determined that it would be able to provide all the equipment we needed for the new line, and we saw this as a huge benefit," continues Lytle. "We would be able to get all our equipment from a single company, which would allow us to keep like items on the shelf to speed up maintenance and reduce downtime. If we needed spare parts or if anything went wrong on the line, we would have a single-source provider to help us out."
Ultimately, Morgan Foods decided to install 12 additional Chester-Jensen cooker-coolers, three of which are holding tanks and nine that are cooker-coolers, on the new line. Included in the project were several tanks, ranging in size from 50 to 500 gallons, which are used to heat and melt frozen blocks of product to prepare for production, as well as four 1,000-gallon kettles where the company makes and heats the final batches of broths, condensed soups and other products. From there, the product is pumped into a newly installed Chester-Jensen 1,500-gallon holding tank where the product is kept warm before going to the filling line.
Chester-Jensen's cooker-coolers are steam jacketed, cone-bottom cooking and cooling vessels for processing pumpable food products. The circulating jacket is 14-gauge, type 304 stainless steel, dimpled and spot welded to the cone bottom and, using spiral heat exchange media design, ASME coded for 100 psig at 340
Contact: Bob Skoog
Chester-Jensen Co., Inc.
(610) 876 6276
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