Thinking about buying a heat sealer?
If you need reliable packaging and a machine that will perform for a long time, choose a brand with extensive experience and well-designed machinery.
The dimensions and format of the tray or trays to be packaged, and the daily production required, will guide the selection of the correct type and configuration of the heat sealer.
Recommended pre-questionnaire:
To get started with tray-seal packaging, it is important to complete this questionnaire:
Step 1: Before analyzing machines on the market, confirm the format and measurements of the trays to be packaged. There are thousands of tray designs and hundreds of manufacturers/suppliers, so it’s important to define the packaging as a first step. Zermat recommends its clients opt for standard-design packaging, so they have multiple suppliers for consumables and because they offer a greater range of heights, materials, colors, etc. The greater the variety of versions within a single tray format, the greater the versatility of the machine’s mold.
Step 2: Define whether you will be working with a single format or different tray sizes and calculate the production required per day/week.
Step 3: Confirm whether one or more working molds are needed with the heat sealing machine.
Step 4: Define the most appropriate model: Machine type (drawer-rotary-inline) / Production capacity in cycles per hour / Production calculation based on containers per cycle + cycles per hour.
Step 5: Confirm the purchase of the machine and start production (custom molds are made for each client and production time varies between 4 to 8 weeks).
Step 6: Contract the supplier for the top film. This can be transparent or custom-printed. To work with printed film, the machine must be equipped with the optional “printed film detection photocell.”
Step 7: Contract the gas supply if you are going to package in MAP format (for vacuum sealing in skin format, a gas connection is not required)
Step 8: Prepare the machine’s operating location; install electrical and compressed air (if required), coordinate film, tray, and gas orders, and have all the materials ready for delivery by the authorized Zermat installation supplier.
The expiration date of the food to be packaged
This is the starting point in choosing the right system:
Frozen products or those that do not require storage for more than 3-4 days.
Recommended option: SIMPLE HEAT SEALER, perfect machine models TBG/TBG+.
Fresh products with short shelf lives. Examples include cooked meals, salads, fish, fresh meat, and processed foods, which require a shelf life of between 1 and 12 days.
Recommended option: Heat Sealer with Gas Flushing System, perfect machines models TBG/TBG+
All types of dry and fresh products for maximum shelf life. Examples include precooked foods, fresh meat, sausages, sliced meats, and cheese, which require long shelf lives.
Recommended option: Vacuum Sealer with Vacuum + Gas System, perfect machines models TB2/TB4/TB5. For vacuum packaging with or without gas injection (in skin format) to achieve the
máxima vida útil del alimento envasado.
Interesting facts about purchasing a Zermat heat sealer
- Vacuum packaging in a heat-sealed format with inert gas injection, in a modified atmosphere, began to be used in France in the 1980s. It arrived in Spain in the 1990s, and since 2000, this format has seen exponential growth on shelves and in stores.
- In some products such as red meat or fish, gas injection with Oxygen O2 mixtures greater than 70% is used.
- Since this gas is flammable and causes dangers in the environment of use, to operate the machine with O2-rich gas, it must be equipped with a special vacuum pump for this application (Busch red).
- The entire range of Zermat traysealers allows you to configure the right pump for each application. The special Busch Red pump allows packaging in all types of food gases.
- A vacuum pump suffers more when packaging moist products (such as fish) than when packaging dry products with little water (such as nuts). It is important to always maintain the various parts of the machine and vacuum pump properly.
- Zermat traysealers allow packaging of trays in different materials, in MAP or Skin format, using the same mold, without making any changes other than the program on the control panel, and the heat-sealable film reel, using MAP material for Gas or Skin for vacuum without gas.
- It is advisable to perform periodic vacuum quality checks on the packaging machine. Zermat offers accessories such as the VacTester for accurately checking the vacuum level reached by the packaging machine. There are also accessories such as the Oxybaby for checking the atmosphere inside the package and vacuum control + actual gas content. Find more information and applications on our website.
NOTE: The heat-sealable tray market is constantly innovating, with new formats and types of materials emerging every year. Recently, most manufacturers and consumables suppliers have focused on offering the most sustainable and environmentally friendly materials. To preserve the vacuum and gas in the packaging, it is essential that the packaging be made of “barrier” or “high-barrier” material for longer shelf lives.
