Weighing is a critical step to maintain the integrity and quality of all types of food products. Accurate industrial scales can help food manufacturers stay productive, profitable and competitive.
Importance of Proper Weighing Practices
Different equipment and processes at food storage sites are often exposed to various temperatures and environmental factors. To cope with these unique environments, it’s important to take necessary measures to protect your weighing equipment. Several recommended weighing practices include:
- Thorough Cleaning
In food areas that require varying temperatures, there is a high likelihood that liquid may accumulate on your scales and that food particles may stick to them as well. This can affect the accuracy of weight readings. It’s important that scale surfaces remain clean at all times. Contact your scale manufacturer to learn appropriate techniques and materials that can be used to clean your scale.
- Frequent Calibration
With the propensity for measurement inaccuracies, it’s important to regularly calibrate your scales. It’s also important to factor in the disparity between a food’s weight under normal conditions and also when frozen, if applicable. Some scale manufacturers make the calibration process extremely time consuming, which should be a factor when choosing a scale to use in the food industry.
- Understanding the Environment
Different food products require different temperatures for packaging, processing and storage. It’s incredibly important to understand how these temperatures will affect your scales to take the necessary steps to protect your weighing instruments from rust, cracks, and pitting, among other damaging elements. Depending on the scale that you choose, environmental factors like draft can have significant effects on the accuracy of your weight readings.
Arlyn Scales – Industrial Scales for the Food Industry
At Arlyn Scales, we’ve been leaders in the scale industry for more than three decades. We’ve used our 30+ years of experience to develop a wide variety of industrial scales that can help improve productivity among our customers in the food industry. We currently offer a variety of different scale models to meet your needs, including:
- Bench Scales
- Platform Scales
- Drum Scales
- Cylinder Scales
- Floor Scales
- Ultra Precision Scales
Regardless of the model you choose, all of our scales are built to withstand many of the challenging environmental factors seen on a daily basis in the food industry. A few of the features of our scales that help separate ourselves from other food scale manufacturers include:
- Stainless Steel Load Cells
Load cells are undoubtedly the most important component of any industrial scale. While many manufacturers will cut costs by fabricating their load cells out of steel or aluminum, at Arlyn Scales, the majority of our load cells are built using stainless steel. This helps to add an additional layer of durability to our scales that isn’t often seen from other manufactures.
Other companies may attempt to use superior materials on other areas of their scales to make them appear more rugged, when in reality, the components such as the load cells are built using vastly inferior materials. We understand that many of our larger scales may be used in the food industry and have made the commitment to always use stainless steel load cells on these models.
- Stainless Steel Platforms
In addition to our stainless steel load cells, we also offer the option of stainless steel platforms for added strength. Our stainless steel platforms are easy to clean and resistant to moisture and corrosive materials.
We even offer a variety of protective coatings that help to protect your scale platform from rust and corrosion. This is in contrast to many of our competitors who advertise a protective coating, which is usually nothing more than enamel paint, that when chipped, opens up the opportunity for significant rust and corrosion.
- Customized to Meet Your Needs
Many of our customers in the food industry have unique processes, which require a custom designed scale. At Arlyn Scales, we design and manufacture all of our scales in our New York based factory. This means that your scale will be designed right here in the U.S., where you can be involved in the entire process.
Aside from the benefits of customization, manufacturing our scales in the U.S. allows us to sell our scales factory direct to our customers. This has helped us offer our scales at highly competitive prices, while not having to sacrifice our scale quality or features. We do not utilize a dealer network and have instead chosen to build strong and direct relationships with our customers.
- User Friendly Touchscreen Displays
While we still offer our more basic, digital indicator, we’ve recently released our UpScale Touchscreen indicator, which puts a wealth of scale features directly at your fingertips. Powered by a Quad Core processor and a 7-inch IPS widescreen display, you’ll no longer have any problems reading weights from the crystal clear digital display. In addition, your employees will quickly master the touchscreen functions, as if they were using their favorite tablet at home.
- Field Based Calibration
All of our scales leave our New York factory fully calibrated and ready to go to work for you. Through our self-calibration scale feature, should your scale ever need calibration, it can easily be done out in the field, without having to take your scale out of service.
This allows for the compensation of temperature variations and other environmental and equipment factors. While many scale manufacturers make scale calibration extremely difficult, if not impossible without a manufacturer or dealer’s assistance, at Arlyn Scales, our calibration process is extremely easy and can be done right from your digital display.
- Datalogging
While our scales offer a wide array of connectivity options, one that is often used in the food industry is our datalogging functionality. Many of our customers in the food industry must place their scales in areas that are not easily accessible by a PC. This makes it difficult to use some of our connectivity methods such as USB, Ehternet or WiFi.
To address this issue, we’ve added the “data logging” feature to our scales, which allows our customers to connect a USB drive directly to one of our scales to quickly download weight data. After downloading this data, customers can then access and analyze it on a computer at a later time. This allows users to still have the accuracy of computer based weight readings, without having to ever connect their scale to a network or PC.
How Are You Handling Weighing Items in Your Food Processing Plant?
If you think you could improve upon how you’re weighing items within your business, it may be time to call in the professionals at Arlyn Scales for help. We can dissect your business and come up with ways to boost protection and improve your bottom line. For more information, don’t hesitate to contact our support staff today by phone at 800-645-4301 or through our online contact form.
