Key Takeaways
Coca-Cola Consolidated reduced stretch film costs by 20% and cut film usage by 30% by deploying Atlantic Packaging's Must IoT monitoring system across 11 facilities with over 70 automatic wrappers, using real-time sensor data and AI analytics to optimize wrapping settings and catch equipment issues before they become costly problems.
- 20% cost reduction in stretch film expenses across 70+ wrappers tracking over 6 million loads annually
- 30% less film used with variance of less than half an ounce from target application rates over five years
- Film breaks reduced to 2% compared to industry average of 5% on automatic wrappers
- AI-powered alerts flag equipment issues early, enabling preventive maintenance and reducing downtime
- Simple deployment with cellular-only architecture requiring no IT integration or infrastructure changes at plant level
A lot of packaging facilities, stretch wrapping operates mostly on the honor system. Settings get established, and operators adjust them over time, leading to drift away from initial specs. Anyhow, as long as the machine is turning, few facilities track what's actually being applied to each load. Excess film cost, inconsistent containment, and even the occasional down-load don't tend to be attributed to a stretch wrap issue long after the fact, if at all.
Coca-Cola Consolidated has been working to change that for roughly a decade, deploying Atlantic Packaging's Monitoring, Usage, Standardization, and Technology (MUST) stretch film management system across what is now 11 production facilities and more than 70 automatic wrappers. The results have been significant, and the program has matured well past its initial installation. Now, with new hardware rolling out across the network and AI being applied to more than a decade's worth of pallet-level data, Coke Consolidated is pushing further.
"It's stretch wrap — it's not a raw material that is high on anybody's radar," says Melanie Sabella, who manages packaging and materials for Coca-Cola Consolidated. "But it costs a lot of money, and any way you can get a little tighter control on it pays off in the long run."
A mixed pallet of Coca-Cola Consolidated products receives stretch film. Different products require different wrap recipes, each maintained by Must to its own benchmark.Coca-Cola Consolidated
New Capabilities on an Established Platform
The MUST system is now several generations in on both hardware and software. Ward Warren of Atlantic Packaging describes the current and newest rollout, featuring updated hardware across Coke Consolidated's facilities, as the necessary foundation for the software capabilities that follow. Ward Warren of Atlantic describes as the necessary foundation for the software capabilities that follow. The hardware mounts on any automatic wrapper from major OEMs including Wulftec, Lantech, and Orion without requiring an equipment swap; Atlantic is Wulftec's largest North American distributor but the system is not exclusive to any single platform. Sensors use cellular connectivity to send pallet-level data to Atlantic's servers, where it is charted and returned to plant contacts as weekly reports with color-coded health scores by line and product type.
"We have been cautiously integrating AI into the MUST system for several years," says Warren. AI tools now inform the daily health score messaging sent to plant contacts and Atlantic's stretch application specialists, flagging which issues are driving low scores and what to do about them.
The same data also supports predictive maintenance. Sabella says her maintenance teams have already noticed they're catching problems earlier, spotting trends in wrapper performance data before they result in failures or extended out-of-spec production runs.
"We can see when machine performance is beginning to deteriorate and perform root cause analysis," Warren says. "This allows us to make adjustments or replace inexpensive wear items before they lead to big issues, costly parts replacement, and unplanned downtime."
Adds Sabella, "With AI moving as fast as it is, I would be shocked if they weren't already looking at it. They've been well ahead of this game compared to other vendors out there. I can only imagine what they're doing with the data now."
The underlying mechanics explain why the savings are real. Stretch film behaves like a rubber band. The further you stretch it, the stiffer it becomes, which means higher containment force on the load. The goal is finding the pre-stretch percentage that delivers maximum containment from minimum material, and then holding it there. That improvement in pre-stretch also improves film yield (i.e. how much usable coverage a roll delivers) which is how the material savings actually compound. MUST makes that possible by detecting when the optimized settings drift, which happens gradually and invisibly without monitoring.
The system tracks more than footage. In addition to ounces of film per load, it monitors tension level, whcih is a more nuanced measurement since a wrapper can be applying the right amount of film at degraded tension. That means containment force is compromised even when the film count looks normal.
One specific problem MUST catches that's otherwise nearly undetectable: pre-stretch percentage degrades over time as mechanical components wear. A wrapper can run normally in every visible sense while delivering measurably less containment force than it was calibrated for. And without data, those conditions can persist for weeks before anyone notices.
A stretch-wrapped pallet moves through a Coca-Cola Consolidated distribution facility. Proper load containment at this stage — the product of calibrated wrap recipes maintained across more than 70 wrappers in 11 plants — is what separates a clean delivery from a down-load. Coca-Cola Consolidated
How it Started
The MUST system itself traces back to a challenge from Coca-Cola brand headquarters in Atlanta, where Atlantic's technicians would optimize wrapper settings at a facility and return weeks later to find operators had adjusted them back. The customer's ask was direct: build something that preserves the optimized state after we leave. Coke Consolidated came to the resulting system roughly a decade ago, already a film and equipment customer of Atlantic's, and was among its earliest adopters.
The pilot convinced leadership, though it took about two years to build the internal case for a full network rollout. Hardware costs ran to $10,000 or less per plant, with no ongoing software service fee.
"Not only were we able to find out that some conditions of our equipment needed help and that different plants were wrapping things different ways," Sabella says, "but we could also get a handle on usage and why it was high or low in a certain plant."
What the Numbers Show
Across 70-plus wrappers tracking more than 6 million loads per year, the results at Coke Consolidated have been consistent: a 20% reduction in overall stretch film cost, 30% less film used, and variance of less than half an ounce from target application rates over the past five years. Film breaks sit at approximately 2%, against an industry average of around 5% on automatic wrappers.
Across the company's product mix of cans, small PET bottles, and 2-L formats spanning multiple Coca-Cola system brands, consistency matters. Beverage loads are prone to mid-pallet instability, and containment-force calibration varies by product type. Atlantic's Packaging Solution Center established the wrap recipes used across the network by simulating the vibration and braking events loads encounter in transit. That gave Coke Consolidated data-backed containment targets for each product type rather than rules of thumb.
"If a bottle hits the ground, we can't sell it," Sabella says of the stakes here. "Down-loads can be very, very expensive if you're suffering from a lot of them. This is a huge preventer of that."
Notable to applications where heavy liquids are palletized, Warren points to a specific vulnerability in beverage pallets that testing helped address: the middle.
"Beverage loads in particular seem to often be weak in the middle of the pallet," he says. "That's where they want to shift, and everything above them wants to follow." Wrap recipes for Coke Consolidated's lines are calibrated to reinforce that zone, with containment-force targets set by product type.
Properly contained pallets stage in a Coca-Cola Consolidated warehouse awaiting shipment. A "down-load" — a pallet that topples in transit or in the warehouse — means product that cannot be sold, making load containment a direct cost issue.Coca-Cola Consolidated
Operations Without Friction
Part of what has made the system viable at scale is how little it demands from plants. Atlantic's team monitors the data and initiates contact when something is off, with a tiered alert structure: actionable emails for lower-priority issues, direct calls when a major setting change puts loads at risk.
"You can give people all the data in the world, but if nobody's looking at it, it doesn't really matter," Sabella says. "They have an entire team dedicated to watching your data and getting back to you if they see a problem. The onus isn't on the plant."
The system also avoided IT friction. MUST's cellular architecture is outbound only; Atlantic has no access back in. "My IT department had no problems because it was only out," Sabella says.
Stretch wrappers are often overlooked in preventive maintenance routines, Sabella notes. "As long as it's going round and around and up and down, nobody really pays attention to it." The MUST data changes that. "Now somebody calls and says, 'Hey, something's off. Go look at the stretch wrapper.' We might have spent a month out of spec, using extra film. Now we might spend a week."
The pallet-level data also has a forensic application. When a down-load occurs somewhere in the distribution chain, Coke Consolidated can request a record of how that specific load was wrapped — what line, what time, whether the wrapper was in spec. Warren says the data can determine whether a down-load was a wrapping issue or something else entirely, such as a handling event in transit. That changes how damage claims get evaluated.
Sustainability as a Byproduct
The film savings have also enabled a sustainability upgrade. Coke Consolidated has begun a closed-loop stretch film recycling program with Atlantic and is introducing film with 18% post-consumer recycled content at select facilities.
"We started recycling our stretch wrap with Atlantic a couple of years ago," Sabella says. "It's just the right thing to do."
The program's value is partly in what it doesn't require: no IT integration, no OT infrastructure changes, no dedicated analytics staff on the plant side. "We started this way before IT/OT stuff was huge and digitization was everywhere," Sabella says. "This is the easy way to start getting your feet wet to seeing data that you couldn't see yesterday."
Atlantic's roadmap points toward expanding the platform beyond beverage and into other product categories. For Sabella, the longer-term opportunity is in combining MUST's decade-plus dataset with the broader plant digitization now underway across Coke Consolidated's facilities. "I think combining both of those things is going to be huge for us in the future," she says.
Asked what she'd tell a counterpart at another CPG considering a similar program, Sabella has this to offer.
"I would advise anybody that is wrapping anything to do it. If nothing else, I can guarantee that their equipment will remain in better shape than it is today," she says.
