Last year I was touring a production facility with seven shrink wrappers. It was a lovely warm March day -about 55 degrees outside. The doors to the facility were open in order to let the cool air in.  As we discussed the product line, speeds and quality, I became increasingly overheated.  The shrink wrappers were making me so hot. Even with the open doors and a slight breeze, it could not dissipate the heat generated by the shrink ovens. I kept trying to imagine the working conditions on a 95 degree day in July in that facility.

Armed with the obvious excessive heat generated by their current wrapping method, I asked if they were looking at energy costs in their calculation of potential savings. They replied that they were not.

Imagine our surprise to get a call from a prospect a few month ago who actually cared about the energy savings. They had done their own calculations of their current energy costs for their shrink wrapper and had concluded that the energy savings alone could justify the cost of switching to overwrapping. Unlike all our other customers who switched from shrink wrap, they were not calculating films costs.

More and more customers are looking at costs holistically. Take a look at this recent article on food companies saving money. Email sales@packagemachinery.com or give us a call at +1.413.732.4000 x110 to discuss ways we can save you money.

Someday soon some one will call us and look at both relative film and energy costs.

2012 New Year's fireworks over the water

2012 snuck up on us while we were busy, but we are very excited by the variety of wrapping projects on order or in discussion. Some are new and cannot be discussed until they are on the shelf.  Here are some samples of what might be coming.

• frozen food in waxed paper wrapped boxes
• fruitcakes of varying sizes and shapes
• several bundling projects in varying sizes

in addition, we will be revealing a new line of wrapping machinery in in February for the candy and snack market.

Stay tuned for next month and keep us in mind for wrapping projects, big and small. We will help you do it sustainably.

In light of the trade off between packaging and product waste, a few weeks ago I posted a question about what constitutes a sustainable wrapping material on a LinkedIn group, The Packaging Technology Forum. My question elaborated on sourcing of material and questioned both carbon creation and water use in creating material.

Responses ranged from condescending to thoughtful, but most seemed to feel that no material on the market today is truly sustainable, even if it is bio-sourced. Several worthwhile answers included

• Environmental value also must deal with what it replaces, and balance the various factors: energy, effect on air and water, disposal, carbon gain/loss (a future issues) etc. Allan Griff
• What looks good to customers isn’t necessarily the best, or even the right thing to do. You need to look carefully at where materials come from, what their effect is on product (protection and shelf life), and what really happens to them at the end of use, not just what you would like to happen. Iain Ferguson
• Use a material that can be recycled and then look for another material which is better. Use something that has a claim to be sustainable rather than discuss the issue and take no step towards sustainability. Actions make material sustainable, not talk. Ian W Cooper
• Printed films and material using inks and adhesives that are made by chemical substances, not easily to replace with bio-solutions…. Be serious and realistic…. There are hybrid solutions but the market doesn’t like to pay its costs. Giulio Ghisolfi
• The real problem in North America is consumer education and commitment. Michael Finnegan

The conclusion is that there is no miracle wrapping material yet, but there are intermediate ones if one is willing to pay for it. Consumer education remains an open issue, since without consumer engagement, contamination of the waste stream is a potential problem.

in the meantime, see my discussion of what Package can do to help with reducing your wrapping resource consumption.

FA-ST overwrapper

We have been building servo driven overwrappers for over ten years now – longer than anyone else. That translates to greater experience with using servos to control overwrappers. In fact, we are on our third generation of software controlling those servos and we support two different platforms for our customers’ choice. Of course, the history of Package overwrappers goes back to the 1930′s. Some overwrappers from that decade are still running today.

Usually we talk or write about how servos reduce the number of moving parts and that makes for more economical after-market service since there are fewer parts to replace or get out of alignment.

That overlooks an important aspect of servo control however. Servo control permits- in fact requires- adjustment on the fly, so that the machine does not get out of alignment. This is most obvious when it comes to printed film, since the machine is making sure it hits the registration mark with every cut of the film.  The constant feedback loop that servos offer mean that this is going on  while the machine is in operation. This eliminates the manual adjustment that mechanical machines require.

Servo controls permit recipe storage so that the machine can reset cut length and film positioning over the product depending on which recipe you choose. Using sensors, the machine will speed up or slow down to match the speed of product coming into the machine.

Package Machinery’s servo overwrappers are a world apart from other overwrappers for other reasons too. Ours can offer both quick change and speed- up to 150 packages per minute. They can wrap trays, boxes or bundles – all on the same machine.

Add to this

• background editing that lets operators create, modify or copy wrap recipes while in production
• digital heat read outs and feedback loop, so the temperature for sealing is constantly self-correcting
• rugged machine construction for long term use
• Category 3 safety interlocks and guarding that meets international safety standards
• broad range of wrapping material options including bio-sourced films and waxed paper

When it comes to flexibility, economical operation and respect for your operating costs, there is no better choice than the FA-ST servo overwrapper. Check out this video. Then call us at +1.413.732.4000 or email sales@packagemachinery.com for more information.

Why not worry about some other piece of equipment instead of your overwrapper?

Today it was about patient satisfaction, in my role as a trustee of a hospital. Satisfaction is about meeting or exceeding expectations. Patients have expectations about what will be done to them, what outcome the healthcare will provide, how they will be treated. Most times the practitioner is expected to make expert judgements. Clear expectations on both sides are called for, especially since the patient has to have a role in his/her own health and recovery. Yet many health care delivery organizations treat the patient like a cherished object. The patient can feel helpless and take no role in assisting him or herself to a better and healthier life. Together the health care deliverers and the patient can work together for the best outcome for that patient.

How does healthcare apply to selling and building a custom wrapping machine? When we sell an overwrapper, we are experts on our machine, its features, its software controls, its speed.  What we need to learn more about is the setting the machine is going into: the people who will take care of it, the type of product that will be run on it and the material that will be used to wrap the product. Sometimes even the climate control plays a role in the outcomes. We also need to engage the buyer in the decision-making about all of those factors they can control.

When do we fail?  We fail when we assume. We fail when we do not engage the buyer in the decision-making and they assume.

When do we have best outcomes? We succeed when we engage the buyer so that they are part of the decsion-making and setting of expectations, when they have expectations of their own to meet and we are helping them to that goal.

Read about what you should expect when buying a servo wrapper from Package Machinery.

Many customers ask us about what sustainable wrapping materials should they consider. It is tough to answer but here are some things to think about.

Most of the conversation when it comes to flexible packaging is about using renewable sources. The reality is use of renewable sources often ignores the alternate uses of the raw material as well as the ingredients required to make the raw material into a wrapping material. Let me elaborate on unintended consequences.

For instance, corn can be made into ethanol (using more energy than it will generate in the form of petroleum for fertilizer and energy) and PLA which can be made into film for wrapping. Using corn this way has demonstrably driven up the price of corn and therefore its by product: meat. So should we make PLA from something other than corn, such as sugar? What about the destruction of rain forests to create sugar cane plantations as the alternative?

Now, from Greenblue.org, we learn that paper has all sorts of other ingredients. One of the key ones is water plus a whole host of unpronounceable ingredients. IS this sustainable? Greenblue doesn’t answer, but we should.

I am not trying to suggest that you should choose one wrapping material over another. What  I am saying is that to be truly sustainable requires looking at total cost assessment, which includes those costs you may not be paying for right now. Those include deforestation, clean water use, dead zones at the mouth of the Mississippi, as well as the ones we know well: air quality, ozone levels, global warming by human action (as opposed to natural cycles the earth has gone through over millions of years).

The support Package Machinery can offer is that we try all of the materials we can on our overwrapping machines and stand ready to try new ones as they come out and our customers request it. As our customer, we will support you and help you make the best choice for your application. Perhaps the most important thing to know is that you can change wrapping material later and still use the same machine you bought from us.

Check out our video on making products more sustainable and our commitment to improve sustainability.

At Pack Expo Las Vegas September 26-28, Package Machinery will showcase its semi-automatic machines: the TTDF, table top diefold wrapper and the Wrapster overwrapper. We will also be discussing our newest additions to our high speed servo wrapping machine line up.

TTDF diefold wrap style

Both semi-automati wrapping machines are productivity enhancers over hand wrapping. More importantly, they standardize the consistency of product wrap and appearance.  All too often, customers stay with hand wrapping while they lose time and efficiency and have inconsistent wraps from one employee to another.

Overwrap fold style

Our first Wrapster customer, a contract packager was able to triple their business with their customer because of their ability to provide a steady volume of consistent wraps.

Our first TTDF customer  was able to stop wrapping by hand and focus on growing the product line while enabling a lower cost employee to wrap products, consistently and attractively.

Package staff will also be available to discuss our larger machines for which we are best known: the FA-ST high speed servo overwrapper and our new inline servo bundler/wrapper.

Sustainability
To understand how we can help you be more efficient in wrapping, see this video.

Recent projects have included bundles of tissue packs, trays of snacks, bundles of OTC pharma products, caramels, brownies, fruitcakes, confectionery, and personal care products. Let us know about your project and how we could help you.

Contact us at customerservice@packagemachinery.com if you need a free invitation for Pack Expo.

Please visit us at Booth 1308 on the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

AT&T is unapologetic about its opportunism with greening the planet, stating up front that:

“The most competitive economies of the future will be those that turn natural resource constraints into opportunities.” — att.com/telepresencerevolution

Clearly we too would like to be opportunistic about our technology. Overwrapping uses less film and less energy (both items being natural resource based) than alternative wrapping methods. In particular, our machines, being servo driven, use fewer parts and require less maintenance than other overwrappers on the market. This reduces consumption of human resources too.

We offer higher machine speeds than most of our competitors as well.

I wish I could say that we were employing a disruptive alternative but overwrapping has been around for longer than flow wrap, if not quite as long as AT&T’s telephones. We simply were quicker to adopt servo technology to overwrapping than anyone else. But then Package Machinery has been building overwrappers since the mid-1930′s.

So, like AT&T, we would like to make a virtue of our reality and hope that our customers appreciate that their needs and our purposes are aligned.

The machine design is still mechanical at its most basic. This puts a burden on our engineering staff to get it right the first time, so there are no delays in assembling the machine. On a new machine, unfortunately the last thing that gets designed is one of the longer lead items to  get made – the frame that supports the whole machine. This is because we have to design everything else first to know where they will fit on the frame.

Our engineers are working hard on a new machine design right now and in their zeal to dot “i”s and cross “t”s they are being very careful. This is frustrating to the rest of us who want to get on with the machine build. However, bitter experience has taught us that less time in engineering is more expensive in time and money later. This is a hard message to convey to our customers who, having made a decision to buy, would like the installation to come the following day.

West Springfield, MA (April XX, 2011) – Package Machinery Company, Inc. has launched the TTDF, Table Top Diefold Wrapper, an entry-level, semi-automatic wrapping machine for packaging small products up to 3 inches in diameter, such as candy, baked goods and non-food items. With a small footprint and simple operating controls, the Table Top is an economical packaging solution for smaller food companies with small-volume candy and snack production looking to transition from hand wrapping individual items. See video here.

Brownie wrap on TTDF diefold machine

The Table Top can wrap up to 10 items per minute or 500 items per hour using a wide range of materials that help extend product shelf life. Products are wrapped perfectly each time with a fast and efficient diefold process – tuck, fold and bottom seal. Creating a hand-wrapped, specialty look, diefold wrapping is a popular packaging application for caramels, chocolate, granola and fruit bars, and brownies.

“Hand wrapping several small items not only leads to sore fingers, but it is also time consuming. However, in order to take their product and company to the next level, business owners have to focus on the big picture – product development, marketing, and selling,” said Katherine Putnam, President, Package Machinery. “The new Table Top offers an easy-to-use, scalable, and affordable solution for food entrepreneurs to venture into automated packaging without significant financial risks.”

The Table Top Diefold Wrapper is the newest addition to the TTDF line, which includes the TTDF mini for wrapping smaller candies. Standing 30-inches tall with a 32 by 37 inch footprint, the Table Top is economical in its use of space as well as energy and uses a three prong plug for connecting to the power supply.  And, weighing approximately 80 pounds, the wrapping machine can be easily transported and set up to operate on a countertop or table top at any commercial kitchen. To accompany the entire line of TTDF wrappers, Package Machinery will soon release a new semi-automatic banding machine to provide a complete wrap for candy bars.

Package Machinery Company, Inc. designs and manufactures wrapping and bundling packaging machinery for consumer product goods such as bread and cakes, candy, cosmetics and perfume, food, paper goods and office supplies, personal care, as well as games and leisure goods. The company is known for providing attractive wrapping solutions for greater packaging sustainability and enhanced shelf appeal. Package Machinery is a women-owned business located in West Springfield, Mass.

For more information, visit www.packagemachinery.com, Package Machinery’s blog athttp://www.packagemachinery.com/blog/, or follow Package Machinery on Twitter@wrapsustainably and @CandymanKen.