Ilapak revolutionizes pizza packaging

If you buy a pizza at the grocery store, it's over a 95% chance that it will be frozen. When you combine dairy, acidic tomato, protein and vegetables, all full of water, you either have to freeze it or sell it within a day or two.

Ilapak is changing all that with an innovative new vacuumizing technology that reduces the oxygen content of the pizza to less than half a percent. The result is a fresh pizza that will last several months when properly refrigerated.

The vacuum system is combined with Ilapak's modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) flow wrapping machinery for a complete solution capable of packaging both fresh and frozen pizzas on the same line.

Transforming a product category: the future of packaging

It is a technology with the potential to transform an entire consumer product category – such is the power of packaging.

Packaging World editor Pat Reynolds thinks so much of this new technology that he has foregone his usual annual forecast report format, which usually covers several trend-setting applications. Instead, he will concentrate on the many aspects of the Ilapak machine and its innovative control systems from B&R Industrial Automation.

"Why, you ask," writes Reynolds in the December 2010 article. "Because the packaging machinery involved is so innovative, the controls platform so functional, the remote access capability so impressive, and the use of programming standards so advanced that, in a sense, this line is the future of packaging."