Fine Foods puts IMA’s Perfima 500 through the mill

Fine Foods and Pharmaceuticals is using IMA’s Perfima 500, a range of perforated coating pans

Fine Foods produce tablets, capsules, granules and powders, packaged in sachets, sticks, strips, blisters, jars and bottles, produced in ranges from 50 Kg to 2,000 Kg.

The company said it has planned an expansion of the pharma production and is directing its production towards the acquisition of medium-large batches of solid dosage forms.

Giorgio Ferraris, CEO of Fine Foods, said: “We plan to expand the plant in Brembate to increase our production capacity by at least 30%. It is in this context that took place the installation of new coating equipment in the site of Brembate.

“We were looking for a coating system that would ensure us four advantages: full adherence to GMP standards, ability to handle from medium to large batches, ease of cleaning operations and efficiency in the production cycle management. We found them all four channelled into Perfima”.  

The key feature in a coating process is the mixing efficiency and IMA said that its Perfima 500 combines effective spraying and drying systems with an efficient mixing capability to allow uniform distribution of solution in cores, minimising the losses of coating and the contamination of the coating pan.

The machine is equipped with a completely automatic Clean In Place system validated by IMA in collaboration with the University of Parma (Italy).

Fine Foods said the cleaning cycle can start immediately after the process without any need to install additional devices: cleaning nozzles and spray balls cover all the machine’s areas to be cleaned.

Mario Barbini, Director of Pharmaceutical Activities of Fine Foods, said: “Perfima’s Clean In Place system has modernised our approach to the cleaning phase. Thanks to Perfima, we halved the washing time, gaining a batch of production a day. In just over two hours the pan is washed and the room stays clean.”

“IMA Product Managers networked excellently with our technicians”, continues Mario Barbini. “Our installers and IMA designers worked side by side to define the project specifications. All the machine’s devices have been explained and tested in such a way that, during the installation, there was good familiarity with the system”.

Case study: process performances

During the session of preliminary tests held on the Perfima 200 installed at the IMA Active laboratory, some of Fine Foods' processes were tested.

According to Fine Foods the first step was to test both on minimum and on maximum batches a very diluted nutritional coating solution. The result of the test conducted on the minimum batch has allowed to achieve a weight gain of 3.7% in about one hour of spraying.

The companies also tested an active ingredient sensitive to light and to acid rate to be coated with three different layers to ensure both the total protection and the gastric resistance of the tablet.

The collaboration between IMA process technologists and Fine Foods' specialists has led to excellent results from the very first tests, optimising the use of the three suspensions in sequence and the related processing times, according to Fine Foods.

The challenge has been to check the performance in a three-layer film coating process both on minimum and on maximum batches in the same pan, without any changes in the machine’s set up.

The results gained during the preliminary tests were confirmed afterwards, once the equipment was installed and put into production: the processes have been transferred from the old technology to Perfima, allowing a reduction in process time of 30% compared to the past, Fine Foods said.