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When it comes to pack design, many food suppliers to the major multiples are caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand they are expected to innovate, while on the other they are under pressure to cut back on the amount of packaging material they use.

It’s a dilemma that offers an opportunity to the manufacturers of sleeving kit. Sleeves are considered more environmentally friendly than cardboard cartons as they use less material. They also deliver on the innovation count as they can be teamed with different tray shapes to achieve unusual presentations.

“More and more ready meal producers and packers are using ‘watch-strap-style’ cartonboard sleeves. This not only enables the consumer to see the product, but also represents a growing commitment to reducing packaging material,” notes Michelle Tatum, marketing manager with Kliklok-Woodman, a designer of both sleeving and cartoning equipment.

“Given these criteria, our Certiwrap cartoners have been proven to handle a wide range of ergonomically shaped sleeves, with the ability to incorporate features such as product retention, tamper evidence and upright shelf display,” she says.

Kliklok was instrumental in the launch this autumn of Heinz’s new microwaveable Snap Pots format for baked beans and spaghetti hoops. Heinz chose the Certiwrap 150 to wrap a printed cartonboard sleeve around the plastic four-pot pack. Kliklok says the Certiwrap 150 gives Heinz the benefit of easy size changes, while its open design makes it straightforward to maintain.

T Freemantle, meanwhile, has installed fully automatic wraparound sleevers at Northern Foods and Bakkavör Group. Both companies supply private label pizzas to Tesco. They enlisted the help of T Freemantle when Tesco asked them to switch from cartons to sleeves to reduce packaging material.
The problem, says Richard Kitchen, T Freemantle head of sales and marketing, was that pizza is a variable product: different toppings and bases result in different dimensions.

Explaining how the issue was overcome, Kitchen says: “Our wraparound sleever wraps the narrow-band sleeve to the pizza. Then we have two fingers at the end of the machine that pull the two ends of the sleeve together before the glue is compressed. In effect, it’s a pack-squaring facility for irregular products.”

The units installed by T Freemantle are the first in the UK to apply a sleeve to pizzas, and have cut material use by 75%.

But the drive to reduce material use doesn’t stop at switching from cartons to sleeves. Kitchen says retailer pressure is also pushing existing users of sleeves to minimise material usage.

Short-sleeve formats
T Freemantle has responded to this challenge with a patent-pending sleeving concept that enables a 25% reduction in materials use in existing ready meal sleeve applications. The concept incorporates a new sleeve design running on one of its wrap-around sleevers for almost any tray-packed foodstuff. The sleeve is automatically formed around the pack and adhered to the sides or bottom of the tray. Trials have already been carried out with one major producer.

“When you’re already using a band sleeve on, say, a CPET tray, it’s pretty difficult to find 25% [reduction], but we’ve come up with a solution and the means to produce it,” says Kitchen.

Another major focus for innovation in sleeving equipment is making automatic sleeving more affordable.
T Freemantle has developed a lower-cost unit to complement its high-speed sleeving kit in a bid to bring automatic sleeving within the reach of producers running at lower speeds. The machine produces pre-glued sleeves with a four-crease design, which means the pack can stand unsupported on its side on-shelf. T Freemantle says the simple machine requires no glue, no warm-up time and just a few minutes for changeover.

Another firm that has been channelling its efforts into automating the lower-volume end of the market is Keymac Packaging Systems – its new Autosleeve K101 is touted as a versatile and automatic pack sleever for short-run producers.

“To meet the requirements of ready meal manufacturers it was necessary to design a machine with a footprint of only 1.5 metres and extremely quick size-changeover times,” says the company’s Mike Bradley, explaining the rationale behind the K101. “The machine had to be flexible enough to handle square, rectangular, round and oval packs with either full or partial sleeves, without the need for any change tools or parts.”

He says the use of servo motors and a motion control system supplied by Omron were key to fulfilling these criteria. Two servo axes are used to position the trays, as their varying shapes and sizes mean they must be driven from both sides. The third axis controls the loading of the flight lug, which performs the critical operation of pushing the pack into the formed sleeve.

“The latest servo technology has made the machine flexible enough to meet all the demands of ready meal producers and to reduce service and maintenance to a bare minimum. Some of the first units installed have clocked up more than seven million cycles with little or no maintenance required,” says Bradley.

Quick change
Further benefits of the Autosleeve machine are that it takes only five minutes for changeovers between different packs and that it does not require sleeves to be pre-broken along the score lines.

The K101 is achieving up to 60 packs per minute at the likes of Greencore, Oscar Mayer, RHM Foods, Headland Foods, Faccenda and Geest.

Stepping it up to around 100 packs per minute is Cama UK, which recently installed an OTT (over-the-top) sleeving machine to a UK ready meal manufacturer. The machine folds sleeves from cardboard blanks and is capable of packing different-sized rectangular or round trays, with a quick changeover system facilitated by hand wheels, fixed reference points and automatic programme loading. A tuck-in lock device ensures that trays are located securely inside the sleeves.

While manufacturers of ready meals are moving in droves from cartons to sleeves, cartonboard boxes are still the format of choice for many in the food industry, partly because products such as confectionery and tea bags don’t exactly lend themselves to sleeving.

Schubert, for example, has supplied Finlays, the UK’s largest packer of private label tea, with an automated system for packaging tea bags into rectangular cartons.

The line, at Finlays’ facility at South Elmsall, near Doncaster, comprises 10 two-axis robots, including one specifically programmed to shake out and evenly distribute tea bags in the cartons during the packaging process.

Finlays is using the system to fill five different pack sizes containing 80-240 bags that are fed from a series of tea bag machines at a rate of 8,000 per minute.

Operations director Steve Copley says the system has not only increased production capacity, but also introduced quick and accurate changeovers between different formats.

“The previous method of packing was governed by three fixed formats and the means to change from one to another did not exist, limiting our capacity. Also, crews were required to move from line to line as needed, creating difficulties in building teams and ownership of equipment. The Schubert system means lines are very flexible and can change between sizes as well as allowing the development of multiple formats,” he says.

The flexibility to change between different carton sizes was also a key factor in a US speciality food producer’s decision to leave its existing packaging machinery supplier and invest in Cama’s robotic cartoning equipment.

The company wanted two units for loading flow-wrapped meals and sandwiches into pre-erected solid board boxes. Cama supplied two robotic carton loaders, each equipped with a dual in-feed system composed of electronically controlled multiple pockets and capable of receiving up to 550 flow-wraps per minute from two flow-wrappers. More than 10 different box sizes and product configurations are handled by the system, so the ability to provide extreme flexibility and quick changeover times was paramount, according to Cama.

Making items appealing to consumers’ consciences requires a different approach to making them visually appealing. By using sleeves and cartons in innovative shapes and a range of sizes, manufacturers are prising a little space for themselves between the rock and the hard place.

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FORMIDABLE FORMATS
In recent years, equipment manufacturers have been designing machines that allow automated production of more unusual carton formats.

German firm Dienst-Vepatec has launched a new series of rotary carton erectors, equipped with Siemens servo control and touch-screen control panels. These are able to handle more challenging carton shapes and forms due to the greater accuracy and control of the female forming head, when forming the carton blank around the male forming tools, according to Partners in Packaging, Dienst-Vepatec’s UK agent.

The rose style carton or ‘spring box’ (pictured) produced by German confectionery company Storck (the manufacturer of Werther’s Original), is an example of the type of carton that can be handled by the Dienst-Vepatec carton erector. This octagonal carton is a non-glued carton, which opens like a flower when the lid is removed to reveal its contents. This system has been supplied to a number of companies, including Lindt & Sprüngli and Kraft Foods, for erecting and filling up to 60 cartons per minute. Partners in Packaging says Dienst-Vepatec also makes machines that can handle negative-tapered cartons, triangles, and frame and double-wall cartons.