Immersion Cook/Chill System Provides Orderly Outcome

Struggling with a process that caused package damage and inconsistent cook times for its sausages, Johnsonville turned to FPS and its Spiral Immersion System.

WHEN SALES OF ITS fully cooked sausages began to outgrow capacity at its headquarter campus, Johnsonville found a new home in the recently vacated Wigwam Mills factory in Sheboygan, Wis. It took more than a year to transition from sock manufacturing to sausage production, but Johnsonville engineers wanted to make sure that the 190,000-sq-ft facility was fully equipped with state-of-the-art production capabilities.

An important piece of equipment that the sausage maker wanted to reevaluate for the new site was its cook/pasteurize and chill process. After being made, the sausages get packaged in a form, fill and seal machine. From there, the packages are run through the cook and chill process—after which, they run through a quality check and then are boxed for shipping.

Before beginning production at the new Sheboygan plant, Johnsonville was proving out the concept of a cook and bake process, notes Matt Behrs, plant engineer for Johnsonville. “We had an inline cook/chill process that was very hard on our product, so it really bent it up and made it look terrible,” he says. “We were very challenged at coming out with a good-quality product using that system.”

The auger-style water bath unit tended to cause Johnsonville’s product to clump together, reducing water circulation on the product and causing inconsistent heat transfer across the product batch. To overcome the product clumping, the team looked at systems using agitation to maximize water circulation. But the product agitation, along with the use of an auger screw to push the product through the water, caused product package and label damage.

“Because it’s an auger inside there, it would come into flights and they would roll around each other—and they would literally move our labels around, and they would come out very crooked,” Behrs describes. “We had a lot of loss because of label misplacement after they went through the cook system.”

Product also did not pass through the auger system in a reliable first-in-first-out (FIFO) order.