Selfossi, a commercial and industrial center, is located 45 minutes’ drive from the capital Reykjavik in southwest Iceland. Here you can find the historic dairy Mjólkursamsalan, MS, a cooperative of dairy farmers with roots in the late 1800s.
When MS needed to modernize its packaging for milk powder in 2019, it turned its attention to Swedish Vebe Teknik, which had impressed the dairy’s representatives during a trade fair in Munich a year earlier.
“Then we used a fully manual bag filler that required difficult lifting. We wanted to upgrade to a fully automatic machine that was compactly designed and at the same time capable of packaging large quantities around the clock,” says Svend Jörgensen, assistant plant manager at MS in Selfossi.
MS produces four different types of milk powder, and during high season they package around 60,000 kilos of powder a week.
”Autopac 5.46 Easy Clean has the capacity to package significantly more than that, which makes it possible to invest in another drying plant in the future. That is, of course, a big plus,” says Svend Jörgensen.
A challenge with the MS factory premises is that they are relatively small — designed to withstand the recurring seismic activity in Iceland — which meant that a very compact bag filler was sought.
”The other machines we looked at were simply too big. Vebe understood the challenge and found a good solution for us.”
Today, MS has an agreement with Vebe necessitating that service technicians go to Iceland once a year to review and adjust the machine. In addition, at Vebe’s initiative, a web camera has been installed that can monitor the bag filling in real time.
”This means that we have an online service with service technicians in Sweden who can
give us instructions and tips in real time.”
