JG Pears, United Kingdom

"Our aim is to make sustainable, natural products that are of good quality. We produce, collect and transport over 10,000 tons of raw material a week and we ship our products worldwide.” 
-Vicky Prussia, JG Pears Customer Relations Manager.

ACCURATE REMOVAL OF FOREIGN MATERIALS TO ENSURE CONSISTENT HIGH QUALITY OF END PRODUCTS

The accurate removal of foreign bodies from the raw materials coming in is critical to achieving the high-quality standards JG Pears strives for: “Historically we’ve dealt with non-conformances from raw materials coming in,” explains Craig Harrison, JG Pears Site Manager. “We also invested heavily in CCTV systems, so we could try and catch the raw materials also with foreign bodies. But basically, the production guys would have to remove the foreign bodies by hand.”

JG Pears turned to TOMRA for a solution to optimize this part of the process, and Nimbus BSI+ sorters were installed on its low temperature line.

“The main reason for having the TOMRA installed on the line was so that we could improve the quality of our products. People are treating their pets more like their children and we find that they’re interacting a lot more with their pets, so it’s important for us to remove any foreign bodies out of our material to make it the best quality that it can possibly be.”
- Vicky Prussia, JG Pears Customer Relations Manager.

The Nimbus BSI+ free-fall sorter combines the efficiency of laser detection of foreign material and TOMRA’s proprietary Biometric Signature Identification (BSI+) technology that detects biometric characteristics of objects. It is a high-capacity sorter that consistently ensures extremely accurate removal of foreign bodies from the incoming raw materials.

The TOMRA sorters have exceeded all expectations, and Vicky Prussia is very pleased with the results: “The main thing that we wanted to concentrate on was the removal of any plastics. After we’d installed TOMRA, we started to look at some of the things that the machine was taking out of our process, and some of the things that we saw were things like plastics, wood, rubber. Just having the TOMRA machines in the factory, we can see now that we are removing more of the foreign bodies.”

“Non-conformances with our customers have reduced dramatically, and regarding the TOMRAs we see very, very little waste and foreign bodies in our material. The current customers already have seen the difference in the finished product and we’re also having lots of interest from additional customers asking and enquiring about buying our material.”
- Craig Harrison, JG Pears Site Manager.

Once installed the sorter is easy to use, as Team Leader Przemyslaw Twardowski found: “I operate the whole process and operate the new TOMRA machine. It is really easy because the training provided was excellent, and it’s really simple to explain to people how the machine works.” Craig Harrison adds: “TOMRA came over and trained all members of staff from Engineering, Production and Quality.”

A SUCCESSFUL COLLABORATIVE APPROACH

The team at JG Pears is extremely pleased with the way the entire project developed, from identifying possible solutions all the way to installation and start-up: “Working with TOMRA worked really well. Looking outside of the projects, how we can help each other, how we can improve the systems, how we can improve the products, TOMRA was always there to help, always there on the phone, via email. Whenever we asked for assistance, they came to our site and they helped us.”