Ishida was present at the recently concluded Packplus 2015 event held at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. “We are displaying our integrated weighing and packaging line for snacks packaging. We have our complete product range from incoming material to shipping which includes multihead weigher, VFFS bagmaker, seal tester, platform scale, lab balances, batching system, online inspection checkweighers, X-ray inspection system and metal detector,” says Jiro Hatakeyama, director, Ishida India.
Speaking about the exhibition, Hatakeyama says, “The footfall is low, but we hope things will improve in the next two days. There were some serious visitors at our stand today. So if we can get a few more serious visitors at our stand by the time the show ends, that will make our day.”
Located in Gurgaon, Ishida India is a 100 % subsidiary of Ishida Company which provides weighing, packaging and inspection solutions to the food, pharmaceuticals and other industries. “We have R&D centres outside India which deliver innovations and new machines according to the requirements of customers in Western and European countries as well as Japan. Our technology is just right to catch up with the requirements of these customers and so we just have to make some basic developments for these countries,” says Hatakeyama.
Hatakeyama continues, “In India, in many cases, we can make use of the existing technology developed and accumulated for the foreign countries. So we transfer our existing innovations and services to India and most of the time it works and fits well to the needs and requirements of Indian customers too. However, there are times when customers prefer manual solutions rather than fully automatic or semiautomatic solutions due to the flexibility a manual system can offer as well as due to the low labour cost in India. So in India, we have to create a balance for automatic, semi-automatic and manual systems.” According to Hatakeyama, the Indian food market is very unique and comes with different characteristics and requirements which again demand unique packaging technology – that is why fully automatic machines cannot always fulfil the demand of the Indian food market
