From 10 Tons of Tube Ice to a Finished Bag

At our customer's ice factory in Uruguay, production does not end when tube ice drops from the machine.

That is where the second half of the production line begins.

We supplied a Koller TV100 tube ice machine with a rated capacity of 10 tons per 24 hours together with an automatic packing system. The project therefore had to connect two very different outputs: bulk tube ice from the machine and finished bags ready for commercial distribution. How 10 Ton Tube Ice Line Suppor…

For this project, the most important question was not simply how quickly we could make ice.

It was how efficiently the factory could turn that ice into something ready to sell.

The Product Is Not Finished When the Ice Is Made

A tube ice machine produces ice in bulk.

The customer sells a finished commercial product.

Between those two points, several things still have to happen.

The ice needs to leave the production area, move through the handling system, reach the weighing and packing section, enter a bag, be sealed and then move into frozen storage or directly toward dispatch.

At small production volumes, some of these steps can be handled manually.

At 10 tons per day, the workload looks very different.

Consider a simple production example.

If 10,000 kg of tube ice were sold in 5 kg bags:

10,000 kg ÷ 5 kg = 2,000 bags

If the same production were sold in 10 kg bags:

10,000 kg ÷ 10 kg = 1,000 bags

These figures are not the Uruguay customer's disclosed daily sales or confirmed package sizes. They simply illustrate why packaging cannot be treated as a minor accessory in a 10-ton commercial ice project.

The same ice machine could potentially create 1,000 or 2,000 individual packages depending on how the final product is sold.

That changes the workload after ice production.

Designing the Factory Backward from the Bag

This is why we included automatic packing in the Uruguay project.

Instead of treating the TV100 as a standalone machine, we looked at the route the ice needed to follow after production.

For a packaged ice business, that route can be understood as:

Tube ice production → transfer → temporary buffer → weighing → bagging → sealing → frozen storage → dispatch

Every stage needs to work with the stage before it.

The Koller TV100 is rated at 10 tons of tube ice per 24 hours and uses water cooling. But simply installing a machine capable of producing that volume does not guarantee that the factory can prepare the same volume for sale.

If weighing and packing are too slow, finished ice begins to accumulate.

If frozen storage is insufficient, packed inventory has nowhere to go.

If transfer between the machine and packing area depends on too much manual handling, labor becomes part of the production constraint.

That is why one sentence summarizes this project particularly well:

A fast ice machine connected to a slow packing process is still a slow factory.

For the Uruguay customer, automatic packing was therefore part of the production system rather than an accessory to think about after installation. How 10 Ton Tube Ice Line Suppor…

The Finished Bag Determines the Production Flow

Different packaged-ice businesses can use the same tube ice machine in very different ways.

A wholesaler supplying restaurants in larger bags may process fewer packages with more ice in each one.

A supplier selling smaller retail bags may need to handle many more individual packages for the same daily tonnage.

The refrigeration requirement may be similar.

The packing operation is not.

That is why package size, target customers and distribution model matter when we configure a commercial tube ice production line.

For our Uruguay project, the TV100 provides the ice-making capacity while the automatic packing system helps move that production toward a finished commercial product.

The useful lesson from this installation is therefore not simply:

“Koller supplied a 10-ton tube ice machine.”

The more complete story is:

we connected 10 tons/day of tube ice production with the downstream process required to prepare that ice for commercial distribution.

For a packaged ice factory, that difference matters.The machine makes the ice. The production line makes it ready to sell.