Efficient food packaging in flowpacks

Schu­bert offers the lat­est mod­el of its Flow­mod­ul flow-wrap­ping com­po­nent. With a tar­get­ed focus on the user, the com­pa­ny has sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved both machine acces­si­bil­i­ty and ergonom­ics for main­te­nance and clean­ing work. Since its mar­ket launch in 2016, the Flow­mod­ul has suc­cess­ful­ly estab­lished itself on the mar­ket: over 36 flow-wrap­ping com­po­nents have already been sold worldwide. 
With the Flow­mod­ul, food pro­duc­ers great­ly ben­e­fit from the inte­gra­tion of pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary pack­ag­ing process­es. The flow-wrap­ping com­po­nent is ful­ly inte­grat­ed into a TLM pick­er line and can pack­age both bare prod­ucts such as sweets, or snacks in trays. Man­u­fac­tur­ers ben­e­fit from a flex­i­ble, high-per­for­mance machine with a small foot­print, which can very effi­cient­ly han­dle small batch­es, short prod­uct life­cy­cles and a high lev­el of prod­uct vari­ety. More­over, man­u­fac­tur­ers can count on sys­tem effi­cien­cy of 99 per cent and more. The stan­dard sys­tem com­po­nent is equipped with ful­ly auto­mat­ic car­ri­er chang­ing util­is­ing exchange­able cas­settes for fur­ther for­mats, plus for­mat con­ver­sion is com­plet­ed with­in one to ten min­utes. Fur­ther­more, the abil­i­ty to install two Flow­moduls per machine can dou­ble pro­duc­tion output.
“As planned, the Flow­mod­ul has become an impor­tant growth fac­tor for our group of com­pa­nies,” high­lights Johannes Schu­bert, grand­son of the com­pa­ny founder and, since Jan­u­ary 2017, the Flowmodul’s prod­uct man­ag­er. Cur­rent­ly, flow-wrap­ping tech­nol­o­gy is used to pack­age a wide range of prod­ucts, such as choco­late bars, bis­cuits, cakes, choco­late fig­ures, yoghurt cups, con­fec­tionery waf­fles, puff pas­tries and ice cream.

New sealing technology for temperature-sensitive products

The Flowmodul’s most recent devel­op­ment allows cus­tomers to elim­i­nate the cold seal film for the first time ever, even for tem­per­a­ture-sen­si­tive prod­ucts. Switch­ing from cold to heat seal tech­nol­o­gy can result in mate­r­i­al cost sav­ings of up to 17 per cent. “The key lies in con­stant seal­ing times at vari­able chain speeds. Here we will be set­ting new dimen­sions in the heat-seal­able film’s con­trol range,” explains Johannes Schu­bert. The first pro­to­type suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed the test phase and will go into pro­duc­tion in May 2018.