In a feature article you can read at this link, I take a close look at the selection, installation, use, and impact of a new paperboard multipack cartoning system at iconic brand Bumble Bee Seafood. From a big picture perspective, the story is yet another data point on a trend line pointing toward more major brands—like fellow icons Coca-Cola and Corona joining it on the cover of the September issue of Packaging World—making a sustainability-minded plastic-to-paperboard multipack switch. It’s also an interesting snapshot of how decisions made at the top ripple outward over an organization, and particularly how they reverberate across a company’s operations and engineering. But this story took a long time to tell. Patience can be a virtue in this packaging journalism game.
I first got wind of this project nearly two years ago, when Jason Stover at R.A Jones floated a vague outline of a possible story, with more details to come. After the project progressed sufficiently, I finally got a look at the equipment in person at PACK EXPO Las Vegas in September of last year in the R.A Jones booth. That’s when Bumble Bee Seafood held a ribbon cutting on what’s called its Meridian XR MPS-300 cartoning equipment, and I recorded a brief machine walk-through video with R.A Jones’ CTO Jeff Wintring (view it by scanning a QR code on page 82 with your phone). I also sat down to interview former Bumble Bee CEO Jan Tharp, former Bumble Bee SVP, Global Corporate Responsibility, Leslie Hushka, and Jonathon Titterton, CEO of Coesia Americas, the parent company of R.A Jones. If I had a quorum of stakeholder viewpoints about the machine a year ago, why wait until now to publish the story?
At that time, the equipment still had a long way to physically go, from the PACK EXPO Las Vegas show floor, back to R.A Jones in Covington, Ky., for further factory acceptance testing (FAT), and finally to the Santa Fe Springs, Calif., Bumble Bee Seafood facility. And once it was finally on-site in January of 2022, it needed to be installed, tested (SAT), commissioned, and eased into its full production capacity. It took some time for operators to train and work their way up to the machine’s promised changeover times, 97% OEE and 99.75% salable product efficiency, as the equipment proved it could handle in the Covington FATs.
We wanted to wait until the operators knew enough about the machine to be able to tell us about it, relate some real experiences with it, and describe any hurdles they had to overcome in getting the most out of it. Spoiler alert: it grew on them quite a bit, to the point that they affectionately nicknamed it the “Queen Bee” (get it? Bumble Bee?).
