At 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. 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 until 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.
