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US 10,766,645 B2Granted
Food conveyor and packaging systems and methods
AssigneeIntercontinental Great Britain LLC
InventorsRicardo Bacellar, Joao Moreira
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A conveyor and packaging system includes an upstream conveyor that transports stacks biscuits in a plurality of lanes into buckets of a bucket conveyor. The bucket conveyor transports the buckets in a direction perpendicular to the length of the buckets to a packaging area, where transfer devices transfer the biscuit stacks to an input of a packaging machine. The transfer device can transfer the stacks without use of an intermediary conveyor.
Claims6
A food product packaging apparatus comprising:
- an upstream conveyor that transports food products to a bucket conveyor with an array of buckets shaped to hold stacks of the food products;
- a feeding station that feeds the stacks of food products from the upstream conveyor into the buckets of the bucket conveyor;
- and
- a plurality of transfer devices each associated with at least one of a plurality of packaging machines,
- a control module that controls the operation of each of the transfer devices and determines which of the individual stacks of the food products each of one of the transfer devices transfers, and to which one of the packaging machines, the control module being configured to selectively activate any one of the transfer devices to selectively lift, from the buckets of the bucket conveyor, one of the individual stacks of food products determined by the control module to be transferred to a packaging machine and transfer the one of the individual stacks lifted from the buckets to the packaging machine.
2 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.