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Teamwork pays off for everyone

Wise and its film suppliers work together to develop a new metallized oriented polypropylene film that can handle the demands of potato chip packaging.

Roland Baker (inset) checks the nitrogen level in bags of Wise potato chips. To package its chips, Wise Foods, uses 33 bagging m
Roland Baker (inset) checks the nitrogen level in bags of Wise potato chips. To package its chips, Wise Foods, uses 33 bagging m

Four and a half million lb. That's how many potatoes Wise Foods Inc. processes at its plant in Berwick, PA, each week. And once they're cleaned, peeled, sliced, fried and flavored, if there are glitches at the packaging machine, Wise could end up with a lot of chips on the floor.

Two years ago, Wise was having problems at its packaging machines. The packaging material performed erratically on the forming tubes of the 33 vertical form/fill/seal machines running at the company. To solve the problem, Wise teamed up with the Films Div. of Mobil Chemical Co. (Pittsford, NY) and converter Bryce LLC (Memphis, TN) to design a new film with better machinability.

The film they came up with is an extrusion lamination of two 70-ga three-layer structures. The outside structure is a clear three-layer coextrusion of heat-sealant/oriented polypropylene/skin layer corona-treated for ink laydown. Bryce reverse-prints this material on a flexo press in up to eight colors. Then, in a separate operation, Bryce uses polyethylene to extrusion laminate that three-layer structure to a 70-ga Metallyte BSM-2 from Mobil. New from Mobil, the BSM-2 is a three-layer adhesive lamination consisting of an OPP core with a metallized film on one side and a sealant layer on the other. The metallized layer gets buried when the BSM-2 is laminated to the three-layer coextrusion.

The material formerly used was similar in construction, but the sealant layer on the inside of the bag had poor slip characteristics. On the vf/f/s machines, this sealant layer comes in direct contact with the forming tube as the draw-down belts press the film against the tube. As the tube grows warm from the friction, the heat-seal layer would react to the heat, thus causing the film to stick to the tube.

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