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Report: Innovative New Cartoning Machinery at PACK EXPO Las Vegas

PMMI Media Group editors fanned out across the many booths at PACK EXPO Las Vegas to bring you this Innovations Report. Here’s what they saw in the cartoning category.

Image #1 in the article text.
Image #1 in the article text.

PMI KYOTO Packaging Systems used PACK EXPO Las Vegas to exhibit its washdown horizontal cartoner (1) for frozen foods such as prepared meals, ice cream novelties, and more.Image #1 in the article text.Image #1 in the article text.

The new, all-servo driven cartoner has a compact design, providing a small footprint and making it easy to integrate. It is designed and built to FDA sanitary standards and features heavy-duty, fully welded stainless-steel washdown construction. Quick and simple changeovers are performed at the touch of a button on the HMI, making it ideal for a variety of SKUs and suitable for CPGs and contract packagers. With built-to-last, quality construction and materials, this system features full-height guard doors with interlocked stainless frame. The system can run cartons or sleeves at speeds to 240/min.

Also ideal for CPGs and contract packagers is the system’s flexibility to ramp up or down production as needed. For smaller runs or lower output, a hand-load option is available. When production needs to increase, simply add on a robotic infeed section for higher speeds and added efficiency.

“We’re excited to bring a flexible and efficient solution to the market,” says Branko Vukotic, PMI KYOTO President. “By offering a washdown horizontal system for frozen foods and dairy, we are able to address the needs of additional industries and bring more value to our customers.”

Additional features include a high-speed servo-driven rotary carton placer with pre-break, articulating product buckets with barrel cam pusher heads, servo flap tuckers with cycle stop mode-positive flap closing device, Nordson hot melt glue system and an Allen-Bradley system control platform and HMI.

Image #2 in the article text.Image #2 in the article text.On Day One of PACK EXPO Las Vegas, R.A Jones, a Coesia company, held a velvet-roped unveiling of its future-ready packaging machinery, the Meridian XR MPS-300®. The machine itself is an existing one in the R.A Jones lineup, but it was customized to support The Bumble Bee Seafood Company’s shift to a recycle-ready packaging format for multipacked cans (2). The packaging equipment is the next evolution of R.A Jones’ multi-packer for canned food and beverages, custom-built to replace Bumble Bee’s shrink wrap machines, in what it says is a market-first effort to package seafood multipacks with paperboard.

The Meridian XR was able to meet Bumble Bee’s needs of enhanced operational performance, speed, and reliability because of the equipment’s adaptability.

“R.A Jones is dedicated to providing high-quality and reliable equipment that can adapt to meet our customer’s needs of today and tomorrow,” said Jonathon Titterton, CEO of R.A Jones, at the unveiling. “The process of developing the Meridian XR with Bumble Bee proves that our industry partners can take an actionable step toward innovation by shifting to sustainable packaging formats. We’re committed to continuing our longstanding history of providing customers with end-to-end insight and engineering expertise, as packaging trends continue to evolve.”

R.A Jones’ packaging equipment and technology consultation will fuel Bumble Bee’s bold sustainability goals, including a commitment to provide readily recyclable packaging, an action driven by consumer, customer, and retailer support. Producing as many as 26 million multipacks (165 million cans) annually, Bumble Bee identified the shrink-wrapped product as an opportunity to continue to meet its commitment to keep plastic out of landfills and out of the ocean. As the first in the seafood industry to invest in and deploy paperboard multi-packaging, the partners set a pace and precedent for the global seafood industry to innovate.

“Moving our multipacks from shrink wrap to paperboard was not a simple process, but as a company we felt strongly that it was the right change to make for our planet, our customers, our consumers, and also for Bumble Bee as a category leader,” added Jan Tharp, President and CEO, The Bumble Bee Seafood Company, at the unveiling. “Engaging with an experienced, values-driven OEM partner to guide our packaging format transition was integral to making this work, so partnering with R.A Jones was a natural next step.”

While enhancing product protection throughout the manufacturing process, the partnership’s packaging solution also equips Bumble Bee with an easier-to-read packaging opportunity for conveying product benefits to consumers at the store shelf. The ergonomic benefits of the paperboard also assist in making the packaging more user-friendly and easy-to-open. When consumer tested against Bumble Bee’s current multi-pack, the paperboard packaging earned significantly higher scores in terms of appeal and purchase intent, and it was perceived to be demonstrative of environmentally friendly packaging.

Retail customers have also expressed enthusiasm for the new paperboard packaging, citing increased flexibility in terms of shelf-space options. The new paperboard multipacks are expected to launch in stores as early as the first half of 2022.

Packaging World attended the unveiling at PACK EXPO and spent some time waking through machine features with Jeff Wintring, Chief Technology Officer at R.A Jones. The standard Meridian XR MPS-300 is a beverage multi-pack cartoner for cans and bottles (300 ppm). Unique features of Meridian XR include a four-lane infeed for new packaging options and configurations, integrated can-count verification after loading, and six- and 12-in dual pitch transport. In the customized Bumble Bee application, which entails wrapping cans of tuna into paperboard multi-packs of various formats, Wintring called out a few other unique features.

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