Dairy company boosts speed with wraparound packer

FrieslandCampina is one of the world’s largest dairy companies, offering products such as dairy-based drinks, infant nutrition and cheese in Europe, Asia and Africa. The company’s regional branch in Thailand handles 300 million tonnes of milk per year, and it turned to Gebo Cermex to install an efficient and cost-effective end-of-line solution for its new Foremost plastic bottles, which feature a complex shape. The 360° approach applied to wraparound mechanisation helped the company achieved speeds of up to 500+ containers per minute.

For their newly shaped Foremost PEHD bottle, running on a dedicated production line in Samrong, the company was looking for a secondary packaging solution able to deliver on speed and reliability, to keep their total cost of ownership (TCO) as low as possible.

FrieslandCampina Thailand decided to install a wraparound case packer machine, together with a bottle line divider at packer infeed — flexible enough to divide the flow from one lane up to eight lanes, depending on the bottle format — and the conveyors connecting the solution to the production line — both upstream and downstream. This helped it achieve speeds of more than 500+ shaped bottles per minute.

“They helped us in validating different formats in-house first, so that we could guarantee that by the time we received the equipment in our production facility in Samrong we just ‘plug & play’ and then we can get the result we wanted. It’s like a vertical start-up. We chose Gebo Cermex because it is the only manufacturer that can deliver the expected performance within a week,” said FrieslandCampina Thailand.

This built on their existing business relationship, in which the company installed a wraparound packer as part of a can line at the same plant 10 years ago.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/davizrophotography