Custom Card Applicator Automates Grab & Go Snack Pack

These thermoformed snack pack trays’ unique, dual-chambered format limited space for messaging, leading Cedar’s Foods to a clever, automated solution for nutritional information cards.

Cedar’s Foods’ snack pack is composed of a thermoformed tray with two compartments, one for dry ingredients like pretzels, the other for wet ingredients like hommus. The pack is sealed with film lid stock, and a nutritional information card is affixed beneath it.
Cedar’s Foods’ snack pack is composed of a thermoformed tray with two compartments, one for dry ingredients like pretzels, the other for wet ingredients like hommus. The pack is sealed with film lid stock, and a nutritional information card is affixed beneath it.

In the early 1980s, Beirut natives and U.S. immigrants Abe and Layla Hanna noticed a lack of good Mediterranean food in New England. Equipped with authentic old-world Lebanese recipes for hommus (it’s spelled with an ‘o’ over there, so it will be in this article as well), taboule, and similar classic sauces and condiments from the Levant, the two launched Cedar’s Foods, Haverhill, MA, in a bid to introduce their native cuisine to the mainstream North American palate. The company name stems from the Lebanon cedar, a tree native to the mountains of the Eastern Mediterranean that’s emblematic of the Lebanese landscape.

Over its nearly 40 years in business, the company has nurtured its own Cedar’s Foods brand while at the same time building a robust co-manufacturing and co-packing business. Ultimately, Cedar’s Foods’ multi-level campaign, exposing hommus to consumers on the national brand, store brand, private label, and owned brand levels, worked to grow the business, and the acceptance of hommus into the American mainstream.

Brand positioning requires speed-to-market
Due its unique manufacturing capability, specifically its commitment to food-safe, clean-label pasteurized products, Cedar’s Foods has carved out a unique and identifiable niche for itself within the natural and organic grocery channel. “According to industry data, Cedar’s is the national brand leader in the chains that lead in this channel,” says Sam Wolman, Sr. V.P. Sales & Marketing at Cedar’s Foods. Cedar’s Foods’ hommus performs well in U.S. conventional grocery channel as well where it is the number two brand in terms of units sold. As the category has matured Cedar’s growth has exceeded that of the category overall largely as a result of a creative marketing campaign, heavily digital, that implores hommus lovers to “know better hommus.”

“One of the things about our capabilities as a co-manufacturer for private label that’s critical, and this ties into packaging machinery vendor selection, is our speed to market,” Wolman says. “One of the consistent comments we get from our co-manufacturing partners is how rapidly they can commercialize a product when they’re working with us. And this is often a product that starts from scratch with no equipment in place. Our senior management is involved in all aspects of product commercialization, and through our partnerships with packaging machinery vendors, we can execute and commercialize our customers’ products in record fast time.”

Cedar’s Foods is able to accommodate brands’ with entirely dedicated packaging lines, rather than a percentage of capacity on an existing line. The company’s current 87,000 sq. ft. Level 3 SQF production facility is churning out 1.7 million pounds of hommus per week, with the lion’s share being part of co-man/co-pack projects. It will soon be able to offer even more space and dedicated lines in the form of an entirely new, Level 3 SQF-certified, 125,000-sq-ft. facility that’s under construction. Capacity for the new facility will be 2 million pounds of hommus per week, and already a third of that capacity is allocated. And it needs the space. The company has grown at a steady pace of 25 to 30% per year for the last decade years. The growth is based, at least in part, on Cedar’s Foods’ ability to turn projects around quickly.

“A brand-new project that hasn’t been developed yet? We could take that from a thought to actual production within nine months,” says Nick Scangas, COO, Cedar’s Foods. “That is almost unheard of for many major brands. They give us a year and a half timeline, and we can halve that. To do so we have to rely on OEM vendor relationships. This involves getting the equipment in place and installed, tested, and ready to go, and nine months is always the key to the timeline in getting the project going.”

NuSpark Inc. Toronto, is one of those such OEM vendors. Really standing out was a nifty recent custom-machine build that has since extended to four, soon to be five installations within Cedar’s Foods. The challenge here was single-serve snack packs, a growing trend in snack food.

Grab and go pack starts a trend
The full spectrum of Cedar’s Foods’ product line, at least as hommus is concerned, ranges from 5 lb. tubs to 2-oz. thermoformed cups. Scangas says the most growth—both in total volume and SKU variety—is at the smallest sizes of the product spectrum, right down to 2-oz. single-serve packs. This reflects grab-and-go, single-serve, snack-size, or portion-control trends.

“We had a snack pack that we developed for ourselves, under the Cedar’s Foods brand, using a single-serve, thermoformed PP tray with two cavities. One cavity holds dry product, either a type of chip or pretzels, the other is for viscous hommus or yogurt,” Scangas says. “The single-serve pack is lidded with film, a nutritional label is applied, and it is packed into retail-ready trays.”

It turned out to be the pack that launched a thousand SKUs, to continue the Hellenistic theme. A household-name brand noticed this product in the marketplace and approached Cedar’s about a snack pack with a similar application, only using cream cheese in the place of hommus, and bagel chips in the place of hommus chips.

“We put a project together for them, and 25 million units per year later, it’s doing extremely well,” Scangas says. “And then another company came to us with a similar project, this time yogurt, and then another. And they all wanted to hit that nine-months-to-market mark. And we’ve been able to replicate that. So we’ve done a lot of, those two-compartment snack pack lines, and we got more projects that are coming on over the next few years. We know how to do it extremely well, and we do it fast.”

Nutritional information a challenge on a small pack
An ongoing battle with single-serve packs is that all nutritional information—really, any messaging that otherwise might be found on panel of a paperboard carton—needs to fit onto a much smaller pack. And in the case of these dual-cavity thermoformed trays, the complex geometry limits the amount of real estate for messaging and nutritional claims. The only consistently flat surface on the pack is on the film or foil lidding material. Being single-serve, that space is already limited; adding nutritional information would crowd the pack’s branding and visual appeal. Now a brand owner might go the route of gluing a paperboard belly band around the pack to add messaging space, but that only adds packaging material, hurts sustainability profile, and increases consumables like ink and paperboard.

The answer was to split the difference between the two possibilities and optimize the design by affixing a die-cut 2D paperboard nutritional information card to the bottom of each pack. The nutritional information card bridges the gap between the two thermoformed cavities, adding stability to the pack while creating messaging real estate that wasn’t there before. The only problem? It was a tough manual process, and existing automation was complex.

“When we were first experimenting with this snack pack format with our own product lines, with hommus and pretzels, it was new to us. We just called [NuSpark] up and said, ‘Hey, we have this operation that has unique requirements, do you have anything?” Scangas says. “It was amazing to me that the concept they came up with was completely different than what was available from other vendors in the market. It really simplified the whole process. I looked at other equipment and I saw that not only where they more complex, but they were much larger pieces that required a lot more footprint. So NuSpark engineered this machine, which I believe was the first of its kind.”

Boris Motskin, project manager (at the time) on the project for NuSpark, observed the single-file orientation of the line, particularly as the snack packs finished primary packaging, and immediately began problem solving around it.

“For a product like this one specifically, single file is difficult for card application or labeling,” he says. “We had to develop a custom piece of automation for Cedar’s Foods. It’s unique and is a good example of custom automation that we do for customers, many of whom already have a lot of our secondary packaging solutions in their facility.”

Custom solution: Nutritional card applicator
To accomplish this task, NuSpark built a rotary-style nutritional card applicator, using Bosch Rexroth controls, that could reside just upstream from tray- and case-packaging functions.

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