Production flexibility needed to speed new product pilot testing

Dedicated high speed machines and highly automated production lines are not providing UK manufacturers with the flexibility they need to meet rapidly changing demands from retail customers, a supplier of ready meal tray sealing equipment has claimed.

According to Neil Ashton, sales manager for Packaging Automation, to meet demand for rapid new product develop, manufacturers need to complement high volume lines with flexible manual and semi-automatic equipment and pilot lines to ensure that new ideas can be tried out quickly and without the delays and high costs of investment needed for dedicated tooling used in high speed lines.

“Retailers will not come to you if you are just producing volume,” claimed Ashton, who said retailers expected their suppliers to provide innovation too. While reluctant to name companies, he said there were few own-label ready meal manufacturers successfully investing to exploit market opportunities in the ready meals sector, as retailers sought to drive down their supplier costs.

“Retailers are not committed to suppliers,” he said, in a clear reference to Asda’s decision to switch a major ready meals contract from Ferndale Foods to Northern Foods at very short notice last year. “Products are just moving from one factory to the next - no business is safe - you need to give the best efficiency and price.”

High-speed lines typically operate at speeds of 260 to 300 trays a minute, compared to nearer 60/min for semi-automatic lines. But tooling for semi-automatic machines is just one-tenth of the £30,000 to £40,000 cost for high-speed lines, said Ashton. However, he pointed out that quick tool change on packaging equipment was not the panacea that many believed it to be. Although tool changes on flexible equipment might take just two minutes, he said, bottlenecks further upstream were likely to be more of an issue.

PA has recently completed a Link research project with partners Loughborough University and Northern Foods to investigate the feasibility of replacing conventional tooling for sealing flexible film on to ready meal trays with laser heat sealing technology. Further work in this area is planned, and if it proves successful it could eliminate the cost of tooling completely. Ashton predicts that laser technology will become a commercial reality within five years.