Reduce Meat Tray Rework with Smarter Lid Scheduling
Updated: 5 days ago
Fibre King Pty Ltd creates a custom lid scheduling solution streamlining the logistic process for NCMC.
Keep the right lids ready as your product mix changes—and reduce the need to handle heavy trays twice.
When a meat tray reaches the lidding station without the correct lid available, it creates another job for your production team. The tray needs rework, labour is diverted and packaging becomes harder to manage. For meat processors handling a changing mix of products, keeping lids available in the right sequence is an essential part of maintaining production flow.
Fibre King helped Northern Co-operative Meat Company (NCMC) address this challenge by combining two lidding machines with custom lid scheduling software.
The challenge: more than 30 SKUs to coordinate
NCMC needed to expand production to meet demand while coordinating more than 30 different SKUs per day. The two lidders could accommodate 12 lid SKUs at a time. If the required lid was unavailable, a tray was diverted for rework. With trays weighing up to 27 kg, avoiding repeat handling mattered. The team needed advance visibility of upcoming lid requirements so they could prepare before products reached the machines.
The solution: turn production data into a practical lid schedule
Fibre King used the previous day’s chiller records to identify tray SKUs and their incoming sequence. Barcode scanning then identified arriving trays and directed them to the appropriate lidder.
A 55-inch production-room monitor displayed lid requirements for:
Current production.
The next hour.
The next four hours.
Operators could see what to load, what to bring into the room and which lids were no longer required.
The result: fewer trays needing another pass
The original project reported reduced manual handling and rework through better visibility of upcoming lid requirements. Preparing the required lids ahead of production helped prevent trays being rejected because a lid was unavailable. For operations teams, this illustrates the value of connecting machinery with practical production information. Knowing what is coming next makes it easier to coordinate materials and keep people focused on productive work.
Could better lid planning improve your line?
If your team regularly diverts trays for rework, spends time chasing packaging materials or struggles to prepare for SKU changes, review the information available at the lidding station. Can operators see the upcoming product sequence? Do they know which lids to prepare? How often is a tray handled again because packaging was unavailable?
Those questions can help identify where better scheduling and automation could make a practical difference.
Let’s look at your lidding bottleneck
Tell us about your product mix, tray weights, production rate and where rework occurs. Fibre King can work with you to assess the bottleneck and explore an approach suited to your operation.
Discuss your meat packaging line with Fibre King.
