Page 38 - Packaging News Magazine July-August 2018

CASE STUDY www.packagingnews.com.au July-August 2018
Bagging a growing market
FreshFood embarked on a packaging automation overhaul to meet growing demand in the coffee bag segment. Alison Leader reports.
FreshFoods factory manager Ramon Alvarez, Mespic owner Fabio Garavini, and Esko technical sales manager Paul Asciak in the newly automated factory.
HE face of coffee in Australia is chang-
ing, and convenience is king for con- sumers. With this in mind, many are waking up to the fact that coffee-in-a-
bag is a strong proposition.
And The House of Robert Timms is
largely responsible for this trend.
The brand had successfully cornered a niche in the coffee category, and an in- crease in growth in this segment made it
hard to keep up with the demand.
“The growth in this segment was strong, and we struggled with finding the capaci- ty to get the volume needed to match the growth of the company – we were using 25-year-old equipment, and couldn’t keep up,” FreshFood factory manager Ramon
Alvarez said.
“It was important that we didn’t change
anything about our product – we wanted to keep the same coffee bag, which uniquely has a string and tag attached.”
Alvarez said the company’s original pro- duction regimen required intensive manu- al labour for the packing of the coffee sa- chets into retail take-home packs in three different formats – 8, 18 and 28 counts.
Further to this, the shelf-ready display cartons for each size didn’t follow any commonality for sachet loading, or any di- mensional relationship for packing.
FreshFood made the decision to partner
with specialist packaging equipment sup- pliers Mespic, which is Italy-based, and its agent Esko Australia, to come up with a new approach.
TOWARDS CONSISTENCY
FreshFood consulted with Esko/ Mespic on a solution that would provide uniformity in the packing of the sachets into the three retail formats, starting from a flat blank as opposed to a crash-lock design.
“The original design of the carton was crash-lock, and we’ve moved to a machine- formed carton so we can get some cost sav- ings in the materials,” Esko’s technical sales manager Paul Asciak said.
...we struggled with finding the capacity to get the volume needed to match the growth of the company – we were using 25-year-old equipment, and couldn’t keep up.”
“Together with Mespic, we worked with FreshFoods to come up with an efficient carton design for automation, and also pro- vide far better, more user-friendly opening features for the retail inner cartons.
“It’s brought more efficiency in the man- ufacturing process and better packing au- tomation.”
Asciak said it took a long time to come up with a commonality between the three pack formats of 8s, 18s and 28s.
“The three original carton designs were uniquely different to each other, so this provided some challenges,” he said.
“Although there was the crash-lock on the 18s and 28s, the eight-count was a flat blank carton – and with a very different loading format.”
Another key concern for the designers was the materials used.
“The 28s, in the original format of the crash-lock, had a manual positioned divid- er. In the supermarket, the preference is to continue on with double-facing, but it was very important to find a way of positioning the divider pad,” Asciak said.
“In planning the automation, we were able to automatically position this divider.” Further to this process, FreshFood was also looking at a way of packing the 28s in a different format, which the automation was
able to achieve in a single-facing design.
38