Rulmeca solutions for the challenging demands of fruit and vegetables processing industry

Rulmeca is a world leader in manufacturing and supplying innovative and premium material handling solutions. The main strength of our products is their suitability for the most demanding sectors. Speaking of unit handling applications, fruit and vegetables industry is one of the most challenging since all tools and machines must comply with strict hygiene regulations, as it is required in the food processing industry in general. Rulmeca Drum Motors are designed and manufactured specifically to meet these requirements.

Main goal: long shelf life of food

Fruits and vegetables consumers always look for freshness and quality of these products when buying them. The first determining factor to get them is food long shelf life, which is strictly related to the compliance with hygiene regulations during their processing.

General food industry hygiene guidelines define regular washing and disinfection of machines to guarantee minimal contamination of food, including automated conveyor systems which are typically employed during production and processing stages. In addition, fresh products like fruits and vegetables need intensive washing and in some cases heat treatment to remove soil and possible pathogens before packing and delivering them. Therefore, high standard components with IP 69 ingress protection, which withstand all cleaning operations and high-pressure cleaning are required for belt conveyor systems.

Since hygienic and waterproof design is essential to ensure quality and long shelf life of fruits and vegetables, conveying system manufacturers must pay attention to this aspect when choosing their components suppliers.

Advantages of our Drum Motors

Rulmeca is an ideal and trusted partner for manufactures of conveying machines and systems for unit handling applications, including fruits and vegetables industry. In particular, Rulmeca Drum Motors are the preferred driving components for belt conveyors in this field thanks to their energy efficiency and their hygiene compliant features reducing contamination risk of food.

Easy to clean

First, Rulmeca Drum Motors feature stainless steel finish and have flat smooth surfaces. Moreover, one of their main characteristics is the all-in-one design: they are seamlessly integrated into the system, compared to alternative components, such as central drives with chains or decentralized drives with worm gears. These features together avoid dead spaces and corners that are difficult to clean, helping to prevent the creation of rust, dust and microorganisms. Finally, these products withstand any cleaning operation since the motor is hermetically sealed and offers the highest ingress protection – up to IP66/69 – even during the highest pressure wash down procedures.

Energy efficiency

Conveyor systems in fruit and vegetables industry not only operate in wet environments due to regular washing of machines and products, but also in climate-controlled environments which are cooled down to temperatures of 1° to 10°C depending of the specific industry or processed food. Therefore, a low power consumption of drive components is essential to reduce thermal losses and resulting cooling costs for air conditioning of production areas. In this respect, Rulmeca Drum Motors boast a high energy efficiency because they are able to use less energy than alternative components, helping to reduce power consumption and benefiting production process.