Shelf ready versatility

7 February 2012 – Arpac has been carrying out a development programme aimed at combining its well proven shrink wrapping technology with a wide variety of automatic tray packing machines. The aim of this programme is to provide the ultimate shelf ready pack in terms of low cost, efficient shelf utilisation and strong transit performance.

Tony Hacker, general manager of Arpac Europe explains how this programme came about, "Customers kept telling us about the pressure they are under to produce different packaging styles to create competitive advantage or new shelf appeal, as well as cut costs and operate ever more complex machinery with untrained or temporary staff. So we decided we needed to come up with systems and machine combinations that would help them deal with these new demands.

"It is often assumed that when replacing a standard case with a shelf ready format that a fully enclosed corrugated pack is still required," Hacker tells us, "Whereas in fact a tray with shrink wrap is often perfectly acceptable and lower cost. This is not new to the beverage and canned produce industry but there is still work to be done with other products such as those with cartons as primary packs."

Arpac has used its experience in case and tray packing to ensure the designs of its shrink wrappers complement a wide range of tray packing machines, both its own and those of its OEM partners. This ensures that Arpac’s systems are more versatile, compact and user friendly to give customers greater freedom to automate and reduce costs.

It is easy to inter-connect the controls of Arpac’s machines with others, which means that the customer can choose to run the tray packer and shrink wrapper separately or as one system. Arpac can go further by capturing warning signals, status signals and production information from upstream and down-stream machines and feed it to a central computer system either on a pull or push system. The result is all the flexibility of a modular system with the productivity of a combined system that produces shelf-ready packs using a mix of corrugated and shrink thereby delivering low production and low packaging costs.

Typical of these machines is Arpac’s 708 shrink wrapper, which can accept two inputs from two separate tray packers thereby saving the space and cost of a second shrink wrapper.