Nichrome, a leading packaging machinery manufacturer and the pioneer in form fill seal machines in India has executed a unique automation project for traditional Indian spice Industry. Nichrome used its wide experience of powder conveying and material handling systems in providing the automation solution in spice processing & post packaging sections.

"India exported about 524,690 tones of spices during last year. Estimates by the ministry of commerce much higher exports in the financial year ended March 31, 2013. However, even today the traditional Spice industry mostly handles the processing of spices manually. The process is not continuous and has lot of manual intervention and intermediary storages. This leads to product contamination, human handling, clumsy material flow and loss of material accounting. Nichrome automated all the processes from the in-feed of raw spices like chilly, Coriander, Cummins etc. to the hammer mills to grinding mills to the distribution and onward to packaging center . This increased the thru put of the system, the product flow was closed loop avoiding any contamination or manual intervention and avoided any loss of product. Traditional Indian spice industry needs to quickly adopt to such type of automation as global FDA norms are becoming more stringent," opined Mr Harish Joshi, Managing Director of Nichrome India Ltd.

Commenting on the changing scenario of Indian spice industry, Mr Harish Joshi said, "As the spice industry is looking at wider horizons- like export, they have to adhere to the HACCP norms where manual handling in food processing is minimal and hygiene is of prime importance. This reflects in the quality of the product. The automation of processing plant also enables reduction in product wastages, labour dependency; floor space optimization required and leads to increase in thru put. To market your brand for exports or at modern retail chains, such complete automation and integration of pre and post packaging processes is of utmost importance. Nichrome is ready with such a fully integrated Processing & packaging solution that is going to help the spice industry to successfully maintain and increase exports/ production."

Nichrome successfully commissioned a complete automation solution in processing of 10 tonnes/day of J D Marketing plant at Bengaluru. Nichrome has bagged a repeat order for such complete automation solution from J D Marketing, a renowned Kolkata based 100 year old company with a strong regional brand of spices known as 'Cookme'. The automation solution is for handling from raw material to post packaging system for spice powders like chilly, coriander, cumin, etc.