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Danone thermoforms PET for a niche line of products

Danone sought an alternative to an EBM bowl made of clarified PP, but it didn’t want to lose the bowl’s unusual shape or its clarity. The answer: PET and ‘open-mold’ tooling.

Secondary and tertiary packaging are shown
Secondary and tertiary packaging are shown

Of the millions and millions of single-serve yogurt containers filled each year, the vast majority are polystyrene, both the preformed variety and those formed from roll stock on a thermoform/fill/seal system.


One notable exception is a new line at Danone’s plant in the French city of Pays de Bray, about 90 minutes northeast of Paris. That’s where an Arcil (www.arcil.fr) system is forming round bowls from roll-fed PET. To appreciate this operation for what it represents and understand why it was installed, it helps to look back to 1998, when Danone launched a similar bowl-shaped container for a premium range of yogurts. The unusual bowl shape and the use of a clarified PP resulted in a clear container. This was part of the premium positioning that Danone was after on this particular range of yogurt desserts.


The clarified PP bowl is still in use by Danone. In a through-the-wall arrangement, these are extrusion blow molded (EBM) and then stored in a silo until taken to fill/seal lines. But Danone R&D views f/f/s technology as much more efficient than EBM, because EBM requires the intermediate steps of storing containers in work in process, transporting them to a filling line, and then introducing them to the fill/seal system. So when Patrick Marechal and his colleagues in Danone R&D learned that Arcil had developed a f/f/s system capable of producing clear PET bowls, they decided to give it a try primarily because they wanted to produce their yogurt bowls more efficiently.


“We worked with Arcil some years back to develop f/f/s for a PET bowl, but then we stopped,” says Marechal. “Recently they approached us again with what they described as an improved process that produces two cups joined at the top that can be easily snapped apart by the consumer, so in 2011 we installed the system that you see in our Pays de Bray plant.”


The PET line at Pays de Bray forms, fills, and seals cups eight across and four in the machine direction at about 600/min. Sophisticated robotics contribute to the line’s ability to run at this rate. But before jumping ahead to the robots, it pays to take a good look at the Arcil system, where a number of fascinating things take place.


Decontamination


For starters, there’s decontamination of the incoming web by both UV light and by subjecting the sheet to ionization to eliminate the electrostatic charge that causes dust particles to cling to the sheet. Ionization is followed immediately by a vacuum device that removes the loosened dust particles.


Speaking of the web, which is 1.2 mm thick and is supplied by Paccor, it’s not as clear as it might be. Why? Because the EBM bowl made of clarified PP that preceded the PET bowl has a slight milkiness to it. Danone’s Marketing Department didn’t want two different looks—one milky and one clear as glass—confusing the marketplace. So Paccor adds the smallest amount of colorant to the masterbatch so that the bowls thermoformed from PET look just like the ones extrusion blow molded from PP.

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