Containers & Closures: Page 204

Flexibles

Baking kits display holiday spirit

Betty Crocker has cooked up a timely product for the season: holiday baking kits in four varieties. The kits from Minneapolis, MN-based General Mills are packaged in creative and colorful boxes with precision die cuts. Although introduced last year—and seasonally for Halloween—this winter's kits offer new features.

November 30, 2001

Coding, Printing & Labeling

Labeling switch nets savings

Minute Maid is in the process of switching from in-mold labels to heat-transfer decoration on all 1-gal high-density polyethylene bottles for its popular Hi-C beverages. According to Ernest Dunlap, manager of packaging at the Houston-based beverage firm, the change aims to reduce unsaleables at retail.

November 30, 2001

Containers

Achievements

Arlington Press Pharmaceutical Packaging (Schaumburg, IL), a wholly owned business unit of Impaxx, Inc., has been certified by AstraZeneca to deliver products to its Westborough, MA, facility without incoming inspections.

November 30, 2001

Containers

Relocations, expansions

Impaxx, Inc. (Schaumburg, IL) has expanded its printing facility in Raleigh, NC, doubling the building’s size. —Avery Dennison Corp.

November 30, 2001

Flexibles

Perrier sleeves 1-gal PET bottles

Perrier debuts several of its brands in PET jugs decorated with stretch sleeve labels printed in eight colors. New molding, sleeving equipment highlights revamped lines at two facilities.

November 30, 2001

Controls & Machine Components

Wake up and smell the standards!

Attention packaging machine buyers. Take this quick quiz: Are you fed up with trying to maintain increasingly computerized packaging equipment, networks, and plants?

November 30, 2001

Conveying & accumulation

Scale system shines at Diamond

A twin-head, triple-pan scale system at Diamond of California’s Robertsdale, AL, plant reduces giveaway, lessens labor costs, and saves on forklift rental costs.

November 30, 2001

Closures

Abita tests pasteurizable beer in PET

Abita Brewery next year plans to commercialize beer in a one-way multilayer plastic bottle that’s pasteurizable. Until now, the plastic bottles typically used for beer didn’t have sufficient thermal resistance to withstand pasteurization, so brewers choosing to use plastic have had to rely on some form of cold filtering or flash pasteurization. But the availability of this new tunnel-pasteurizable bottle could make one-way plastic beer bottles a viable option for a lot more brewers. Abita Brewery, based in Abita Springs, LA, is a regional craft brewer.

October 31, 2001

Flexibles

Canny cosmetics

In a market where impulse purchases rule, Markwins Intl., has raised the visibility of its cosmetics through unique packaging. The City of Industry, CA-based company’s “glam in a can™” cosmetics that were introduced at select mass merchandisers nationwide in August are packaged in transparent 1-gal paint cans.

October 31, 2001

Closures

Small orders + small orders = big orders

Low-volume buyers of packaging materials are striking up deals and saving up to 40% on their purchases through online demand aggregation.

October 31, 2001

Closures

Small orders + small orders = big savings (sidebar)

Packaging distributor saves 20% online

October 31, 2001

Conveying & accumulation

Delivering for dairy

Oberweis Dairy’s investment in new filling, capping, labeling, conveying, bottle-packing, and shrink-wrapping machinery begins to pay off with the introduction of single-serve milks.

October 31, 2001