To keep those Slyders coming, white castle buys new loader.

White Castle, Louisville, Kentucky, USA, known throughout the country for its little square hamburgers called Slyders, has ordered yet another Fully Automatic Top Load Cartoning System from Bradman Lake.

The equipment is an integrated system incorporating automatic carton forming, product loading and carton closing. The machines selected are the HS2/60 double head lock carton former, LJ DRT Toploader and Compact R Lugless Carton Lid Closer. They will package cooked and frozen wrapped cheeseburgers into retail cartons at speeds of 150 packs per minute.

One of the reasons for selecting the LJ DRT Toploader is that it offers the possibility to achieve faster loading speeds than its previous LJ RT machines. The DRT operate with two turbo trains - one being loaded with wrapped product, the second being unloaded by the robot. This compares with the SRT that possesses one Turbo Train for both loading and unloading. By separating the loading and unloading operations the entire system can run at faster outputs.

White Castle, founded in 1921 long before any other fast food chain - owns and operates about 409 hamburger joints known for their Slyders, a name trademarked in 1994 (Before that, they were known for generations as sliders.). More than 500 million of them were sold last year alone. The meat patty is steamed over a bed of onions rather than grilled, and served on a steamed bun with a single slice of pickle.

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Patrons typically consume a sack of Slyders at a time. White Castle restaurants can be found in about a dozen states, primarily in the Midwest. The company also sells frozen Slyders through supermarket chains, club stores, convenience stores, and vending machines. The chain was founded by Walter Anderson and real estate broker E. W. "Billy" Ingram at a time when people were still wary of ground beef because of an expose of the beef industry in Upton Sinclair's 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle. The restaurant entrepreneurs constructed small buildings with hygienically white exteriors and stainless steel interiors, and outfitted their employees with spotless uniforms to convey the idea of cleanliness.

Bradman Lake produces integrated cartoning, wrapping and end of line packaging systems for food processors around the world. The company operates from two locations in the United Kingdom in Bristol and East Anglia, and one in the United States in Charlotte, North Carolina. Last October, it was acquired by Langley Holdings PLC (www.langleyholdings.com), a diverse internationally operating engineering group that specializes in capital equipment.