There are always new and outstanding opportunities for packaging retail products.
For example, an item in a poly bag with a header could be upgraded to a blister pack and garner a higher price point due to a greater perceived value. Or a product on a skin board could be packaged into a clamshell and, not only look better, but offer greater protection from damage.
Recently a major snack food manufacturer discovered that the printed polyethylene sack offered numerous benefits over the corrugate trays they had been using for their individual snack items. Not only did the printed sacks cost less than the printed trays but consumers loved the brighter and snappier graphics available on the plastic sacks and thus bought more product!
The brown bag with a handle on it has been around grocery and department stores for decades but the idea of delivering multiple single serve units within a sack just hadn’t caught on in the manufacturing arena. That is, not until high impact graphics were added and a manufacturing system that could be used to package large numbers of sacks within a single shift.
But how did this revolutionary sacking technology and solution evolve?
Now Offering Polyethylene Bagging Services
Aaron Thomas Company, working with the FORMOST Equipment Corporation, took basic bread bagging equipment and re-engineered the loading areas and in-feed designs to handle the loading of multiple single-serve corn and potato chip bags into pre-made printed sacks. The mechanisms necessary to automatically fill the sacks were then fine tuned to neatly pack the sacks with organized rows of product to reduce damage and enhance customer satisfaction.
Later, a process to automatically seal the bags with standard or double heat seals was incorporated as was in-line pass or fail check weighing validation, automatic bag labeling, and multi-wicket sack feeding. It took almost a year to incorporate all the modifications necessary to maximize production throughput and to minimize production costs.
This revolutionary polyethylene bagging technology is now available in all three of our locations. It has even been co-opted by our client and is used now nationwide in each of their manufacturing facilities! This resulted in our being honored with the prestigious “Contract Manufacturing Supplier of the Year” award in recognition of our efforts and accomplishments.
As you can see, packaging revolutions are challenging but not impossible if the right conditions are met. First, you need a strong vision of how you want your product packaged and the benefits it offers over existing packaging solutions. Second, you need a product that has the volume and longevity to justify the emotional buy-in and capital investment of your contract packaging partners. And finally, you need a contract packager that has the ability to think out side the box… or tray in this case… to get the job done.
