BERRY Superfos has revealed it has achieved a significant weight reduction on its 1kg UniPack container supplied to German dairy producer, Milchwerke Schwaben.
It comes in a bid to help meet the German firm’s sustainability objectives, whilst at the same time allowing for 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.
Instead of 540kg on each pallet, Milchwerke Schwaben can now fit a total of 594kg of containers on every pallet, Berry Superfos said. This comes thanks to the redesigned container’s reduced headspace and improved indexation which keeps the positioning of pails in a stack.
Jakob Ramm, MD of Milchwerke Schwaben, said, “To achieve the lower weight, Berry Superfos made several small adjustments. 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.”
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.
