Mess #6
Fast Track to Insanity; Soup Line Revisited
As mentioned earlier, the soup line ran 400 cans per minute. If all went well, the cans would stream down the can track from the in-line cooker. At the end of the lengthy can track was the packing area. Workers there had the immense responsibility of running a corrugated case sealer.
Each box had 12 or 24 cans in it. If the cases were not gluing or closing properly, they had to be set aside and run when there was a gap in the line. At times stack upon stack of full, unsealed boxes were sitting off to the side on pallets.
If a case would jam in the machine, which was a common occurrence, the cans would accumulate on the conveyor.
Full cans of soup were moving at a high rate of speed down the track to accommodate the speed of the line. Whenever the line accumulated cans, or "backed up" the cans would smash together and leave dents.
If the line did not pack out cans for a few minutes, perhaps due to a mechanical problem, they would back all the way up to the cooker. It that happened, they would fall out into baskets. At 400 per minute, to would not take very long to fill a basket.
If cooker baskets were being filled, an immediate decision had to be made whether to stop the cooker. If the cooker was stopped, it had to be timed. If the time exceeded a certain amount, all of the thousands of cans in the cooker were overcooked and would have to be scrapped.
Also, if the cooker stopped, the canning area would have to stop since there was nowhere for them to go.
Cans going into the cooker were required to have a certain internal temperature for proper processing. So if they sat on the line too long waiting to go into the cooker they would also become no good.
Cans dented after the cooker could not be reprocessed because they would become mush the second time around. They could not be canned without being through the cooker because they would not be commercially sterile.
I found, as a quality Tech, this area to be a total running nightmare and desired to get away from it. There was no fun to be had there. The regular speed lines were bad enough. As a quality control technician, the line was an immense pain.
The only experience I had in the area as a production worker was to stack boxes on pallets for shipment. These boxes spewed out of the case sealer at the rate of over 30 boxes per minute, or one every two seconds. Don't stop to scratch anything.
I have done this job for 8 hour shifts. This was very demanding and hard on a worker's back as they barely had time to straighten themselves.
Eventually the case stacking later became automated.