Kraft Foods is an international producer of food and beverage products with multiple name brands in five major categories: cheese, biscuits and snacks, grocery, convenience meals, and beverages. These are produced in more than 80 plants across the United States, generating more than $34 billion in annual revenue.

CHALLENGE
Kraft Foods faced two major challenges caused by voltage sags:

Sterility: Kraft Foods’ pudding lines use an extremely complex aseptic processing system that forms, fills and seals the pudding in a completely sterilized environment.

Quality: Keeping bakery conveyor lines moving is vital to ensuring a properly prepared, great-tasting product.

Voltage sags were causing stoppages on both lines. The aseptic lines lost sterility and needed an eight-hour chemical recleaning and resterilization process after each event. The ovens lost product and were a fire safety concern. With 10-15 major sag events a year, costs and downtime were rapidly adding up.

SOLUTION
Initially, Kraft Foods officials suspected automation failure. When efforts to correct this proved unsuccessful, SoftSwitching Technologies installed I-Sense intelligent sensors, revealing the precise correlation between downtime and voltage sags. When a conventional battery-based UPS didn’t solve the problem, Kraft turned to us for the solution.

We installed a MegaDySC battery-free UPS to protect the entire process and five smaller single- and three-phase DySC battery-free UPSs for added protection up and down the line.

RESULTS
Kraft Foods reported that 30%-50% of their total downtime had been completely eliminated, with significant and substantial gains in productivity, efficiency and profit.