Berry has achieved a significant weight reduction for its 1kg UniPack container supplied to leader 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 1kg UniPak container used for its Weideglück brand of 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 1kg container now weighs 35g as opposed to 43g before. But happily, we got even more than that from the redesign project with Berry 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.”
Small adjustments add up
Instead of 540kg on each pallet, Milchwerke Schwaben can now fit a total of 594kg 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 have been achieved without impacting on the overall effectiveness of the container.
“To achieve the lower weight, Berry made several small adjustments,” said Jakob Ramm. “They 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.”
UniPak for almost 30 years
Milchwerke Schwaben is a pioneer in the dairy market. Almost 30 years ago, the company was first to introduce the 1kg container for yoghurt and milk-based desserts. Today, it is still number one in this segment in Germany and also exports to several other European countries.
The 1kg packaging was then – as it is now – the UniPak container from Berry. When first launched, the container weighed 50g; a few years later this was reduced to 43g, and now to just 35g.
Award-winning IML
The redesigned container maintains its eye-catching In-Mould Labelling (IML) decoration to make consumers notice the product on supermarket shelves. The Weideglück brand won an award from the In-mould Labelling Association last year for the decoration on the yoghurt container, which features a smart label with an embedded code that the eye cannot detect. This printed Digimarc code allows consumers to interact with the product and link to a website via a mobile app to check the origins of the product. It also enables retailers to reduce time at the checkout.
The use of the Digimarc matches the Weideglück brand perfectly since the products contain only natural ingredients and are branded under the slogan “Weideglück. Da Weiss ich, was drin ist” which translates to “Weideglück. Then I know what’s in it.”
The 1kg round UniPak container for Milchwerke Schwaben is just one example from the range of shapes and sizes that is probably the most extensive on the European market.
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