Keep on Rolling

Pizza Romana plant manager Eva Maraj (center) keeps a watchful eye on the production flow a the company’s busy Lachine facility that turns out well over 30,000 premium-quality frozen pizza per day for retail customers across eastern Canada.

Frozen pizza producer boosts packaging throughput and quality control with high-speed rollstock thermoform packaging machinery By Andrew Snook

The frozen pizza business is a highly competitive marketplace. To remain competitive, producers need to invest in the latest technologies in their operations in an e ort to constantly improve e ciencies. Les Aliments Pizza Romana understands this well. Employing between 35 to 40 people and operating out of a 60,000-square-foot HACCP (Hazard

Analysis Critical Control Points)-certified facility in Lachine, Que., the company produces between six and seven million frozen pizzas annually for the grocery retail market for a wide variety of customers largely based in eastern Canada— stretching from Ontario to Atlantic

Canada.

They company o ers a diverse variety of rising crust and stu ed crust frozen pizzas using authentic ingredients to bring the flavors of Italy to consumers.

“We have about 20 di erent pizzas, including our rising crust and stu ed crust,” says Eva Maraj, plant manager for Pizza Romana, adding that the most popular items are their eight di erent stu ed crust pizzas.

“We have chicken, sausage, double pepperoni. We have one called ‘The Works,’ with every type of meat imaginable.

“We also have an ‘All-Star’ with all kinds of meat but also has peppers and mushrooms.”

A few years ago, Pizza Romana was looking to increase its production capacity, but the company was struggling with a bottleneck in its packaging depart-

Cockwise: The Lachine plant produces and packages 20 di erent frozen pizza recipes.

From left: VC999 Canada service manager Patrice Turpin, Pizza Romana head mechanic Marc Girard and Carl-Michel Cloutier of VC999 Canada.

ment.

“We had two older machines before,” Maraj recalls, “and they were always breaking down in the middle of production. “We’d have to do repacks every day and we were losing a lot of film.”

While searching for a solution to the company’s production bottleneck, she found the answer in the pages of the Canadian Packaging magazine.

“It was literally your magazine,” she says, referring to reading an article featuring a VC999 high production rollstock thermoformer in a previous issue of the magazine.

“It was about Les Aliments 2000 in Quebec City. They had one machine and I know them, so I called them to get some feedback on their machine and they said they were really happy with it, and that’s when I started to research more on VC999.”

After researching the company’s various technologies, Maraj reached out to Carl-Michel Cloutier, sales manager for Eastern Canada for VC999 Canada, headquartered in the Montreal area.

“We met with Carl-Michel and he showed us the advantages of going with a local company and the capabilities of the machine,” Maraj says.

“I wanted to go local because if I needed service, I wanted someone to be available to help us the same day. He offered that service.

‘Having the film coming from the same company as the machine is also advantageous for us, and it’s also here [in Quebec].

“I was buying my film from Winnipeg [before] and there was a challenge in always having the film available,” Maraj notes. “It worked out well for us, going with a local company.”

The company ended up purchasing a model RS 720 high-performance rollstock thermoformer from VC999.

“We started working on this project about three years ago,” recalls Cloutier. “They wanted to reach a very high-speed, packaging between 30,000 to 35,000 pizzas a day,” Cloutier recalls.

“We got involved in that project to supply a rollstock machine with a very high output. It’s a huge a machine.

“It’s the biggest machine we’ve ever built, in terms of width and deck length,”

“I wanted to go local because if I needed service, I wanted someone to be available to help us the same day. He offered that service.”

Above from left All sealed frozen pizzas coming o the VC999 RS 720 thermoformer pass through the IQ4 metal detector from Loma Systems; a close-up of the Mitsubishi Electric HMI (human-machine interface) panel installed on the RS 720 system; the high-barrier plastic flim for the frozen pizzas is supplied to the plant in rollstock by VC999 Canada.

says Cloutier, citing the RS 720 system’s forming width of 723-mm; maximum index length of up to 630-mm; a loading length of 5,000-mm; a discharge length of 3,600 mm; a draw depth up to 185 mm; and film roll diameters of 500-mm (standard) and 800-mm (jumbo).

“To be able to reach that speed we have special forming dies where they’re completely filled”, Cloutier explains. “We get more speed because we don’t have a lot of air to pump out of the machine.

“The machine presently runs at 15 cycles per minute,” Cloutier states. “It’s pretty incredible.”

It took VC999 about six months of project development to come up with the right solution that would meet the needs of Pizza Romana.

About a year after the initial discussions between the two companies, VC999 was ready to place the machine into production.

“We worked very closely with their technical people to set up the machine with all the conveyors in place,” Cloutier says.

“It took about five days to put everything in place with two technicians. They supplied us with one technician, and we had very good synergy working with him.”

One modification made to the RS720 was the installation of a special touchscreen mounted on a swing arm.

“That way they can work from both sides of the machine, because they have four to six people loading the machine,” Cloutier says.

The di erence in production e ciencies was felt immediately after installing the VC999 RS720.

“We don’t have repack to do, we don’t have wasted film, and our production has gone up close to triple,” Maraj says.

As Maraj relates, the daily production process at the bakery begins at 6:00 am, with the process of making the dough the place on the production line starting at 6:45 am.

“It’s semi-automatic,” Maraj explains. “The dough is dumped into a hopper and then it’s extruded, laminated and formed.

“Then two employees at the end of the line support it on a carboard disc and it goes into a spiral freezer, where it comes out and down into the topping line.” Maraj explains.

The crust is frozen when it reaches the Quantum Topping System automated topping line, where all the toppings are added to the pizza.

“In the mornings, someone comes in and calibrates all the machines to make sure we’re placing the right amounts of each topping,” Maraj relates.

“We pass it through a cheese melter once the pizza is topped. It heats up the cheese a little bit to hold all the ingredients in place, and then goes through a second spiral freezer into the packing area, where it goes into the VC999 RS720 machine,” Maraj continues.

“After it’s packaged it goes through a metal detector and then on to the boxing machine.

“It’s then put into boxes, which then passes an inkjet printer, which prints the lot number for traceability, and cased, and then put into the warehouse freezer,” Maraj says.

To ensure the pizzas are of the highest quality, Pizza Romana has a variety of quality control tests that are performed daily in the company’s laboratory.

“In the bakery, each product has its own production control sheet,” Maraj explains.

“We do weight controls in the bakery and check the size of the crust—it’s all

physical checks.

“The temperature of the water is controlled for the dough [and] the dough temperature is also controlled.

“We also do lot number tracing,” Maraj says. “On the topping side, we do temperature checks of the ingredients.

“We do lot traceability. We check sauce viscosity and make sure ingredients are within their best-before dates—that’s part of the lot recording.

“The weights are taken for each ingredient every hour on the line,” says Maraj.

On the primary packaging side, a variety of tests are performed to ensure optimal product quality, including temperature checks, seal checks to test the integrity of the film, metal detection, and checkweighing of the finished weight of the product.

“On the secondary packaging side, we make sure the label that’s going on the case has the right date, the right lot number, and the right description,” Maraj says.

Afterwards, the cases are transported to the freezer, where all rooms , including the storage freezer, are monitored for temperature twice a day.

As Maraj confides, the company also performs GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) checks twice a day for the entire plant.

“I have QC (quality control) sta that go around and make sure everybody is following the rules,” Maraj says, citing the plant’s well-earned certification to the international SQF Level 2 food safety certification of the Safe Quality Food Institute.

“Now with COVID-19, we also monitor employees’ health and outside activity,” Maraj points out.

“Everyone gets their temperature checked in the morning before entering the plant,” she says. “We also have a questionnaire which must be filled out by each employee before entering the plant.”

Despite now being able to produce upwards of 3,000 units per hour, Pizza Romana isn’t done upgrading its facilities, according to Cloutier.

“We are getting prepared to install a second packaging line because they want to double their production,” Cloutier says, adding that this will increase their daily production to 60,000 to 70,000 pizza.

“They really love the machine,” Cloutier concludes, “and we love working with them.”

Above Erected pizza boxes coming out of the Consolidated Technologies cartoner are immediately coded with a lot number on the side panel by a model 9232 continuous inkjet coder from Markem-Imaje.