“The Indian market is very exciting at the present moment, much more than anywhere else in Asia Pacific or Japan. Our principal business segment is the food industry and as our machine sales are dependent on the maturity level of the industry, the scope to grow here is immense,” says Jiro Hatakeyama, director, Ishida India. There is a huge difference in the sophistication level of the food industry in Japan a fully mature market and in India where the automation level and processed food packaging are still in their early stages. The processed food industry is set to take off in India and bring in new technologies in packaging. It is here that demand is rapidly growing and the need for automatic weighing, packaging and inspection solutions is rising.
Wide range of machines
Ishida’s business volumes in India accrue primarily from inspection systems, check-weighers, X-ray machines, and contamination detection solutions of packaged food. These X-ray machines provide fundamental solutions for detection of metal, glass or stones and not for the freshness or shelf-life of the food. It also has a range of vertical form fill and seal (VFFS) machines for the snack food industry and sell around 120 to 130 VFFS units each year in India. “Ishida India sells around 450 to 500 machines each year comprising of inspection systems, check-weighers, detection, X-ray and VFFS machines and these are areas where demand is growing very fast,” says Hatakeyama.
“We have no direct interest in the food processing equipment but have a 40-yearold global tie-up with our partner, US-based Heat and Control, which has its local head office in Chennai,” says Hatakeyama. “We not only provide the weighing, filling and inspection systems for them but also provide weigh checking systems to most of the suppliers, which include our competitors too, in the VFFS segment. In fact Heat and Control is our agent for the snack and confectionery market. Ishida India sells only the inspection and detection systems, directly.”
Indian assembly operations
Ishida plant in Gurgaon
Ishida has a small manufacturing and assembly unit in Gurgaon for basic platform scales and also for assembling the check-weighers and the multihead weighers at the entry level. “We produced around 350 multihead weighers last year at this plant,” says Nidhi Purohit, assistant manager – marketing, Ishida India. The entry level CHW series multihead weighers are either single discharge or dual discharge weighers. The single discharge weighers have two options – 10-head and 14-head weighers. The dual discharge system is provided with a 20-head weigher with separate remote control units operating each half of the system, allowing a different product to be independently weighed and discharged on each 10 head side.
The VFFS machines sold in India are completely manufactured in Japan. Sold under the Atlas snack food bag maker brand range are its medium to high-speed bag making machines. The Atlas-203 and Atlas-233 can produce bag widths from 3 to 13-inches up to a speed of 200 bags a minute, while and the ultra high-speed bag maker Atlas-123 can produce bag widths of 3 to 9 inches up to a speed of 250 bags a minute. The bag making machines come with the direct over mount configuration and the twin bag maker configuration, and comprise the multihead weigher, the bagmaker, the seal checker and the checkweigher.
