Meal kits are quickly gaining popularity due to Covid-19 with more consumers staying home to cook; by 2027, the industry is expected to reach 20 billion dollars. There are many opportunities for you to earn contracts from meal kit companies because they change their offerings frequently and require many different types of packaging. The amount and variety of packaging is what affords you the opportunities, but also may be a barrier to earning a contract. Your packaging lines must meet volume requirements and be flexible to handle multiple products and serving sizes. Your packaging needs to be leak proof, flexible, compact, and provide sufficient shelf life. 

Specifically, proteins need special packaging attention because they can spoil and have liquids that can leak.  

After building momentum for a decade, Digital Transformation is now front and center in many producers’ strategic discussions. The proof points are building for companies that adopt digital-centric production processes; marked improvements in flexibility, productivity, and final quality are persuasive.

Many use cases are cited for Digital Transformation, but one of the most intuitive and “sexiest” is Augmented Reality (AR). Not surprising, as there is ample empirical evidence that visual training techniques produce better results and delivering real-time visual task guidance virtually guarantees faster learning curves and performance accuracy. As is typical of most complex emerging technologies, the innovators and early adopters tend to be larger organizations that can assume the costs and risk that come with that territory, since they derive significant value at scale from even small or incremental improvements.

While many publicized AR success stories fit that profile today, an increasingly broader cross-section of producers are taking a serious look. It’s easy to see why. Executives are enamored by AR’s use cases – the data points to 30%-60% productivity improvements, underscoring its dramatic impact on staff productivity and quality outcomes.

The question producers have to ask themselves now is how to approach implementation, and it's finally a make or buy decision. We've discovered these key considerations for determining the best option.

2020 will go down in the books as the year COVID-19 changed everything. Virtually no industry was untouched. Some benefited, but many did not.

As a packaging OEM with a medical device practice that includes syringe, test kit and PPE packaging, we've had a front row seat to Operation WARP Speed. Medical device producers, scrambling to deliver equipment to front-line workers under previously unheard-of time pressure, have had to press the envelope of traditional packaging approaches. Little can be done in that time frame to accelerate the production of new packaging machines. Instead, producers have looked to work arounds and embraced changing customer requirements to meet that demand.

We’ll focus our discussion in three areas that have made a difference in the short run: alternative packaging methods employed, automation, and individual versus bulk product packaging.  

Avoid harmful bacteria buildup on your packaging machine by following sanitation requirements. Machine designs should not allow moisture collection and other harmful particulates. A particular emphasis should be put on points of product contact where the exposed product can be compromised.

Washdown machine design and sanitary machine design are not the same.

And the design you need depends on what type of product you are packaging and its accompanying health and safety requirements.

Understanding the difference between the two designs will not only help guarantee your line passes inspection and the delivery of a safe product to consumers, but also can save you money on your machine purchase.

Packaged meatballs are one of the leading products for an industry-leading meat manufacturer.

Their product flies off grocery store shelves, and they’d like to expand into convenience stores and dollar stores. And while they do sell their meatballs in club stores, their current packaging simply isn’t efficient.

To tackle the introduction of meatballs to convenience and dollar stores, along with revamping of their club store packaging, they teamed up with Harpak-ULMA to design the proper packaging for each store.

Investing in a new packaging line requires a considerable amount of due diligence. It’s a significant expense, and an asset you expect to utilize for a long time. Maybe a very long time.

Downtime, the term coined to reflect when a production line is not producing product, is estimated by The International Society of Automation (ISA) to cost the manufacturing industry nearly $650 billion every year. While downtime can occur at any point in a production process, we’ll explore what producers can do to help minimize the risk and impact of downtime in the packaging phase of production. Good packaging machine and automation design works to prevent planned or unplanned downtime, and packaging process analysis can help identify potential downtime risks and improvement opportunities. Equipment designs that minimize the impact of tool changeovers, consumable replenishment, washdown, and other planned maintenance activities are an important piece of this puzzle. However, the unpredictable nature of unplanned downtime combined with many interrelated causation factors makes this a cause-celebre for most producers.

As a marketer looking to drive sales, your packaging designs likely focus on product differentiation, consumer convenience, and consumer expectations. Designing the package can be an artistic experience. However, you need to also be aware of the manufacturability of your design and your engineering team’s goals.