Our New Soup Packaging Robot

I have sinned. For many years, I have coveted my neighbors FFS. 

FFS stands for Form Fill Sealer. It forms, then fills, then seals bags for soups and sauces, so that they can be rapidly chilled instead of being pasteurized, pH-adjusted, or otherwise chemically preserved. FFSs work behind the scenes at many of your finer food production facilities around the country.

I first fell in love with a FFS when visiting a Northern California facility which prepares the soups for most of the western regions of Whole Foods. You probably already know that we bag our soup to take advantage of the rapid chilling technique... first in an array of fishing coolers filled with ice, and now with our beloved industrial chilling tank. But heretofore, we have been hand-filling and sealing our soup bags... a matter of quite some drudgery but more so a serious bottleneck in our ability to produce enough soup for our stores.

Thanks to you, our devoted customers, and to the good folks at Wells Fargo Bank, who helped us finance this gargantuan purchase, we are now the proud owners of a FFS. We are taking suggestions for names for him/her/it...

Watch it work...