Visitors arrive from four continents for the first ‘Food & Beverage Plastic Day’
From pellet to pallet, providing all-round technological and plant engineering solutions that are customised and right on the cutting edge of process optimisation. This, in short, is what Sacmi showcased for the beverage&food industry during the first edition of the “Food & Beverage Plastic Day”. No less than 218 international guests from 42 countries came to Sacmi Imola last 15th September to get a first-hand look at the latest trends and products in beverage&food, an extremely dynamic, competitive sector that is constantly searching for solutions capable of combining productivity and efficiency with machine flexibility and versatility.
The Sacmi Beverage R&D Center – which guests had the opportunity to take a close look at during a guided visit – is where Sacmi innovations are created and tested before being industrialised and placed on the market. This facility, certified by top global players, provides customers with valuable support right from the design phase; it guarantees excellent final results and has an outstanding capacity to personalise solutions in keeping with the fast-changing, varying needs of customer and market. Thanks to decades of experience and know-how, in fact, Sacmi has a vast array of both technological and plant engineering skills in all food&beverage processes, making us the only player in the world capable of providing a comprehensive plant engineering proposal covering both process and product, from cap to preform, from stretch blowing to filling. A good example is the new 200 ml complete cap-bottle packaging project with a total weight of 5.6 grams, a record for the industry, fully made by Sacmi and presented for the first time during the event. Further added value comes from process optimisation solutions – the H.E.R.O project, or High Efficiency Resource Optimizer – that give savings on raw materials, energy and storage logistics. This essential point was explained to participants at the first edition of Food & Beverage Plastic Day during the morning work session. This illustration included an interactive 3D animation of an integrated H.E.R.O. beverage line highlighting the various technologies; the animation allows the individual machines to be explored directly from the point of view of the operator. More specifically, the over 200 international guests from 4 continents were shown the latest developments on the IPS (injection preform moulding) range which, with the new IPS400 for moulds with up to 128 cavities, combines some of the lowest cycle times in the industry with major innovations; the latter include the automated preform unloading system that picks and places preforms directly in octabins, new circuiting inside the plasticizing unit and a special preform cooling station configuration in which the kinetic energy of the picker is recovered and converted into electrical energy. Together with compression solutions for cap manufacturing and innovative integrated systems for stretch-blow moulding and filling, Sacmi also provides a solution that is comprehensive from a process integration viewpoint: Sacmi CPB LINK is the new highly automated dynamic buffer that allows cap and preform production to be integrated with the bottling line as part of a wider energy saving and logistics approach (HERO); it also improves process hygiene. The work session – which, after the morning in the main hall, continued with a visit to the plant to observe the machines in action – also focussed on developments concerning the Colora Cap HD digital printing system for caps and closures. Following years of development and research this can now be used on coloured caps: ultra-high output rates – up to 600 caps a minute – and the ability to effect real-time decoration changes make this solution a powerful ‘added-value’ marketing tool (e.g. promotional campaigns, events, product launches etc.), something that would be unthinkable using just traditional technology. Then, there was the CBF (Compression Blow Forming) technology - designed as part of a green packaging approach (i.e. weight reduction without performance loss) - for dairy containers with a capacity of up to 500 ml. Completing the picture were the inspection solutions, developed for the Group’s various businesses, machines and plants: these are essential for ensuring excellent supervision performance and efficiency. To close the event, all the guests were provided with aperitifs and dinner, ensuring a pleasant end to what was an extraordinary day in terms of both the quality and quantity of participants from the international industry’s key players.
