How a Multihead Weigher Reduces Giveaway and Improves Line Efficiency
A few grams over target, on packs that pass every check and please every customer. It never trips an alarm, and by the end of the year it can cost more than maintaining the line that produced it.
Somewhere on your line, product is leaving the building for free.
Not much per pack. A few grams over the declared weight, on bags that pass every check, satisfy every customer and never trip a single alarm. Multiply it across a shift, then a year, and the total often exceeds what you spend maintaining the line that produced it.
This is giveaway, and it is the one cost in packaging that hides in plain sight.
Why lines drift toward overfilling
The rules are lopsided. A pack under its declared weight is a compliance problem and a customer complaint. A pack over it is simply fine.
So every filling system creeps upward. Overfilling is safe, underfilling is not, and left to itself the line settles wherever it feels comfortable. Comfortable means high.
Any machine that meters product as a continuous stream, by volume or by time, has no way of knowing what it just dispensed. It has to leave a margin wide enough to cover its worst moment: bulk density shifting through the day, a hopper running low, a batch of pieces coming through larger than usual. You pay that margin on every pack, including the thousands that never needed it.
A weigher that decides instead of measures
A multihead weigher turns the problem around. It weighs first and chooses second.
Product lands on a distribution cone and spreads outward to a ring of small hoppers. Each hopper weighs whatever it caught. The controller now holds a live list of real weights and searches it for the combination closest to target without going under. That set discharges into the bag. The others stay put and enter the next search.
Nothing is estimated, so nothing needs a safety margin. That single difference is where the money comes back, and it gives you tighter packs without asking anyone on the line to work differently.
Why hopper count shows up on your P&L
More hoppers means more combinations, and more combinations means a tighter fit to target. The effect compounds quickly, because every hopper added multiplies the options the controller can search.
Hastamat built the CP series to scale for this reason, with up to 24 weighing hoppers and up to 240 weighing procedures per minute. Hoppers are bought once. The giveaway they prevent is saved on every pack for the life of the line, which makes hopper count a commercial decision as much as a technical one.
Three things to specify around the weigher
Three things sit outside the machine and set how much of its accuracy reaches the bag. All three are engineering decisions, and all three are made at specification.
- Piece size sets the resolution. A weigher combines whole pieces, so piece size and target weight belong on the same drawing. Hastamat sizes hopper volume and hopper count around that pair.
- Feed consistency protects the search. A weigher does its best work with every hopper full, so distribution and buffering upstream are inexpensive insurance on a precision machine, and Hastamat builds both.
- Product behavior shapes the hopper. Sticky, oily and frozen products discharge differently, so hopper geometry and surface finish are chosen for the product. Hastamat has a hygienic design range built for exactly those conditions, covered in frozen and IQF packaging.
Put your own number on it
A scale and one afternoon will size the prize, and the figure you produce is the one PPT USA will work from.
Pull finished packs from a normal production run, not a setup run, spread across a full shift so the sample includes any drift. Weigh them. Subtract the declared weight from each. Average those differences, then multiply by your annual pack count and by what the product costs you per unit weight, counting everything spent on it before it reached the bagger.
Do it per SKU. Giveaway is rarely spread evenly, and one format usually carries most of it.
The shape of the results tells you what you are dealing with. A tight cluster sitting well above target may be a setpoint you can correct without spending anything. A wide spread means the margin exists to cover that variation, and no setpoint change will touch it. The second case is what combination weighing was built for.
That figure also feeds the wider picture, where giveaway usually sits alongside downtime and rework. Packaging automation ROI shows how they combine.
When a different technology fits better
Powders, liquids and pastes are dosed instead of combined. A continuous medium is measured by auger or by volume, and Hastamat builds dosing equipment alongside its weighers for exactly that work.
Fixed-count packs are a different problem too. If your customer expects a specific number of pieces, weight is the wrong instrument for the job.
And if your product is placed into the pack individually instead of dropped in loose, you are looking at a different architecture entirely. VFFS versus flow wrapper covers that fork.
Tell us what you are packing
Hastamat has been building weighing, dosing and bagging equipment for over 60 years, since 1953, and multihead weighing sits at the center of what it does. Piepenbrock Packaging Technologies (PPT USA) is the North American arm of the same family-owned group, in business since 1913, so the accuracy quoted at specification is the accuracy our engineers commission on your floor.
Send us your product, your target weights and the pack sizes the line has to cover. If you have run the calculation above, send that too. We will come back with the weigher configuration that fits and what it should recover for you, and we will prove it on your own product before you commit to anything.
