How Tubular Drag Conveying Reduces Waste

The manufacturing sector prizes speed for its ability to maximize production. However, when it comes to conveyors, faster doesn’t always mean better. This is especially true for food producers whose conveyor systems may be moving specialty foods like roasted nuts, breakfast cereal, malted barley or delicate cookies or crackers. For food processing facilities and manufacturers seeking to reduce product loss due to degradation, a slow conveying tubular drag system can help achieve a more successful process.

As material is moved through a conveyor, it faces multiple opportunities for degradation due to poor inlet design, product shearing, conveyor speed, temperature changes, friction-induced separation, and sweeps the material needs to pass through on the way to the next process. These threats can negatively impact the quality of the material and contribute to material loss through breakage and waste.

What is a tubular drag conveyor?

Tubular drag conveying systems feature stainless-steel tubes with nylon or UHMW discs attached to a stainless-steel cable, pulled by sprocket drives attached to drive units. Often the cable is coated with plastic for food-grade applications. The cable and disc assembly passes through the tubing, pulling materials from the infeed points to discharge ports. This slow-moving method of conveying, running approximately 100 feet per minute, typically operates on a single electric motor operating at less than 5HP, making it extremely energy efficient, and gentle enough to support a multitude of different products. This gentle conveying aspect prevents breakage of delicate and/or specialty materials that are worth more when they are whole and unbroken.

A smooth, slow-moving conveying system carefully handles materials to minimize degradation and reduce waste, while offering extensive equipment life. With their many advantages over traditional conveying methods, like augers, and bucket elevators, tubular drag conveying systems are quickly becoming popular among food manufacturers and within other industries where the integrity of the material is more critical than speedy output.

Cablevey Conveyors is a leading world-wide tubular drag conveyor manufacturer based in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Our conveyor technology is engineered to be clean, food-safe, highly-efficient, and cost-effective. Reduce Contamination. Minimize Waste. Lower Costs.

Contact Cablevey today by visiting https://cablevey.com/contact/.

Read more at cablevey.com

Follow us on social media for the latest updates in B2B!

Image

Latest

billing platform
Retail Energy Companies Don’t Need a New Billing Platform, They Need a Better Strategy
February 25, 2026

Retail energy companies are experiencing real pain with their billing systems — but the system itself isn’t always the root cause. Mollie Gaby, Principal at CG Infinity, believes many organizations underestimate how much performance depends on collaboration between technical teams and the business. When developers truly understand retail energy operations and work closely with internal…

Read More
team
When Your Team Becomes the Bottleneck
February 25, 2026

In a candid take on organizational blind spots, Mollie Gaby, Principal at CG Infinity, highlights a hard truth many leaders avoid: sometimes your biggest pain point isn’t your technology or your strategy — it’s your staff. A common red flag is resistance to change. When team members are unwilling to explore new tools, automate…

Read More
asset visibility
Diagnosing Your Capital Asset Health: Why Asset Visibility Is the New Financial Imperative in Healthcare
February 25, 2026

Hospitals and surgery centers own millions of dollars in equipment — but owning assets and having actionable visibility into them are two different things. Most systems maintain inventories, yet many struggle with outdated records, fragmented tracking, and limited insight into useful life or service contracts. With nearly half of U.S. hospitals reporting negative operating…

Read More
CFO
From Public Accounting to CFO: The Leadership Wake-Up Call
February 25, 2026

The CFO seat is being rewritten in real time. Today’s finance leaders are expected to drive growth, lead enterprise-wide systems transformations, and shape AI strategy—while still keeping the close, controls, and capital story airtight. Gartner reports that 59% of finance leaders are already using AI in the finance function, underscoring how rapidly the role is…

Read More