Berry Packaging solution provides 19% weight reduction for yoghurts and desserts

Packaging Solutions

Berry Superfos has achieved a significant weight reduction for its 1 kg UniPack container supplied to leading German dairy producer Milchwerke Schwaben, to help meet the customer’s sustainability objectives. At the same time, this enhancement has also led to smarter logistics and improved efficiency on the filling line.

Milchwerke Schwaben wanted to redesign the 1 kg UniPak container used for its yoghurt and milk based desserts, to reduce the container’s weight and its use of base materials. According to Jakob Ramm, the company’s managing director, the benefits have been numerous.

’We wanted a weight reduction and we achieved almost 19% which we are very satisfied with,’ he explained. ’The 1 kg container now weighs 35 g as opposed to 43 g before. But happily, we got even more than that from the redesign project with Berry Superfos because, thanks to alterations in the design, we can now load more containers onto each pallet. In addition, after modifying our filling line slightly to fit the redesigned container, we have fewer handling costs and our filling line simply runs much better now.’

Instead of 540 kg on each pallet, Milchwerke Schwaben can now fit a total of 594 kg of containers on every pallet. This benefit is thanks to the redesigned container’s reduced headspace and improved indexation which keeps the positioning of pails in a stack. Equally important, all the changes made by Berry Superfos have been achieved without impacting on the overall effectiveness of the container.

’To achieve the lower weight, Berry Superfos made several small adjustments,’ said Jakob Ramm. ’The company reduced the headspace, made the skirt shorter and the handles thinner, and changed the tamper evidence function. In this way, we were able to meet the demand from retailers and consumers to reduce the amount of packaging material without compromising the container’s great consumer appeal.’

The redesigned container maintains its eye catching in-mould labelling (IML) decoration to make consumers notice the product on supermarket shelves.