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Provisur Technologies seeks to meet customer needs with enhanced cheese slicing offerings

Chicago, IL – Provisur® Technologies, Inc.,

Provisur Technologies Inc., a leader in the global food processing market, has expanded its portfolio of leading brands to serve its global customer base with a broad range of value-added equipment and full-line solutions, including cheese slicing.

Provisur is a wholly-owned subsidiary of CC Industries and was formed in 2009 to consolidate the company’s food processing equipment manufacturing acquisitions. The company has established factories, offices and service support centers in the United States, France, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Brazil, China and Thailand, with corporate headquarters in Chicago.

Provisur offers forming, slicing and sliced product handling solutions for cheese manufacturers. Brian Sandberg, Global Product Manager of Slicing, works out of the company’s manufacturing facility in Mokena, Illinois, just southwest of Chicago, where cheese slicing and forming equipment is designed, engineered and assembled.

Provisur’s newest addition to its cheese slicing offerings is the SX380 Slicer, featuring a flexible configuration and open design that assures easy access for fast, thorough sanitation, Sandberg says.

“The Formax SX380 is game changing technology,” he says. “The SX380 combines superior performance, the highest level of hygienic design and true flexibility to accommodate a wide range of products, all in a compact footprint.”

Some of the benefits of SX380 include enhanced product control at the blade for industry-leading yields, flexibility to handle various cheese log sizes, an open, hygienic design with tool-free disassembly and an optional remote mounted electrical control cabinet, Sandberg notes. The SX380 also features a small footprint, big throughput, and rigid, durable construction.

“We’re looking for a high level of portion control as well as high yield,” he says. “We want to make sure we get every last slice out of a log of cheese. If logs vary in size, we can feed them independently to make sure to get very accurate portion control — something that’s unique to our slicers.”

Additionally, Provisur offers a 3D Product Scanning System that ensures precise portion control even with irregularly shaped cheese logs. He adds that interleavers, which put small pieces of paper between cheese slices, also can be added to the slicing machines. They can be custom formulated to meet customers’ unique needs.

In this process, sometimes sheets of paper break — but Provisur designs its equipment to make it easy to fix the machine and start up again, he says. Sandberg notes that a key aspect of sliced cheese/products is how to handle the sliced portions after they come off the slicer.

While Provisur does not supply cheese packaging machines, the company works with various packaging companies and interfaces with them to fully meet customer needs. “Provisur has a full range of portion handling systems, including buffering systems, inliners, timing stations and overlappers. Portions can even be automatically put into the packaging machine after slicing,” Sandberg says. “It depends on the customer and what they’re trying to do,” he adds.

Meanwhile, Provisur also offers its customers a state-of-the-art technology center in Mokena where they can see and test the full offerings of the company’s latest technology. “The Provisur Ingenuity Center is dedicated to helping our customers to push their boundaries and develop solutions to their processing and new product development challenges,” he says.

The center features a 20,000-squarefoot fully functioning and equipped food processing facility, a preparation and test kitchen with industry standard cooking equipment, a food lab with comprehensive testing and evaluation capabilities and conference facilities.

Moving forward, Provisur will continue to round out its product line to ensure it has a full set of offerings for its cheese customers. The company has been adding to its cheese sales team and is working on new product development, Sandberg says.

“We want to fill the gaps our customers have, and we’re always looking to improve and make things better,” he says. “It’s not a destination; it’s a journey. As our customers make changes, we need to make sure our equipment is designed to continually meet their needs now and in the future, while simultaneously making sure we’re fully in tune with processors and consumers and where the industry trends are headed.”