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Foodservice packs at twice the speed

Canadian coffee marketer sees growth in coffee filter-packs used by guests in hotel rooms. A new flow wrapper lets the firm aggressively pursue this foodservice market niche.

These filter-packs of ground coffee represent a growth opportunity for Cordoba Coffee now that the company has automated overwra
These filter-packs of ground coffee represent a growth opportunity for Cordoba Coffee now that the company has automated overwra

Claudio Cordi, president of Cordoba Coffee in Rexdale, Ontario, Canada, was convinced that sales of coffee filter-packs to hotels represented a growth opportunity. But he reckoned that success would never come without a serious upgrade in packaging equipment, specifically the machinery used to wrap the 7-oz filter-packs in metallized polyester.

Cordi found the equipment he needed in a horizontal flow wrapper from Artypac Automation (Laval, Quebec, Canada). Running at speeds to 100/min, the machine replaces a laborious two-step process that required substantial downtime for changeover. This was necessary because, until the flow wrapper was installed, the company used the same machine for two separate packaging jobs. Cordi explains.

"We used to produce a predetermined number of filter-packs on our vertical form/fill/seal machine and set them aside. Then we'd remove the auger section of the machine and replace the roll of coffee-filter paper with a roll of metallized polyester. We'd also put a wider forming shoulder on the machine.

"As the form/fill/seal machine produced pouches from the roll of metallized polyester, we'd manually drop a filter-pack down the chute into a pouch each time the sealing jaws closed. We were lucky to do 40 per minute.

Inefficient though it was, this method of operation was adequate as long as the company didn't pursue the coffee filter-pack business too aggressively. As Cordi puts it, "We were able to operate that way for about two years because it wasn't an area of business that we were promoting."

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