PROMOTIONAL FEATURE
Peter Walker, Country Manager UK & Ireland at Minebea Intec, tells Packaging Scotland about the company’s plans for PPMA 2026 and why bespoke machinery solutions are a growing trend
Q) What do you have planned for PPMA this year?
A) We are going to continue the theme that Minebea Intec had at interpack in Germany, which is ‘Engineered for you’. What that means is, we’re focusing on us as a solutions provider and highlighting that being an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), and with the years of experience we’ve got in the industry, we’ve got many, many options out there to help our customers. Some of that involves completely bespoke solutions or sometimes reengineering some of the equipment we’ve got. It’s making sure customers get the full benefit of our experience.
We’ve spent the last two or three years at PPMA highlighting our new control systems and new Blue HMI for checkweighers and whole range of products. We feel we’ve got that message out now and thought we’d follow along the same lines (as interpack) because something we are very good at in the UK is providing those engineered solutions, whether that’s from a central or local level.
Q) Are bespoke solutions becoming more popular? If so, what is driving that?
A) Yes, I believe they are. We are putting ourselves out there and saying: ‘let us provide a solution, let’s not just try and use something off the shelf because it exists’. I also think (and we’ve seen this in a few projects recently) that people are looking at processes that maybe aren’t the simplest to automate or improve. With ever rising costs of materials, labour, and general production costs, a bespoke solution, whilst maybe being slightly more costly initially, is now justifying itself more. Specifiers are taking Total Cost of Ownership more into account.
As an OEM, we do the design ourselves and build the machinery, so we’ve got the experience of our team in Germany, and various subsidiaries around the world, who have been looking at production lines, designs, and solutions for 30 or 40 years. It’s a resource that really shouldn’t be overlooked. There’s so much knowledge there. We have a whole department geared up towards taking a problem, harnessing all those years of experience, and putting it together in either a new design or slightly changed design on something that we’ve created before.
Q) Any case studies of custom machinery solutions you’ve developed?
A) Here in the UK, we’ve delivered quite a lot of projects in the dairy industry recently. We developed a very small, bespoke checkweigher for a cheese producer. This was measuring and controlling portioning of 15-gram cheese portions. It had a very small footprint requirement – only 360mm-long. It also had to run two separate lanes, be able to control the cutter previously on the line, reject bad portions, and be hygienic. That solution is saving up to half-a-gram per portion of cheese, which soon adds up.
Sometimes we use a combination of a standard machine followed by something bespoke. We did six lines for a large dairy where we used a more-or-less standard x-ray and checkweigher but designed a completely bespoke reject system to handle the speed and complexity of the rejects. The line speed was such that there wasn’t time for a normal reject to reset, so we designed a system where the next one was always ready to go.
We’ve also developed special software solutions. There’s a bigger focus these days on data collection in general. Those people who tend to be looking for these extra savings also need to measure that.
Q) Do you offer showroom demonstrations to customers?
A) We do. We have a full demonstration suite in Birmingham. We bring people in with their products and problems and have lots of ways to explore potential bespoke solutions. We can do lots of testing. It becomes a bit of a brainstorming session and gives the customer the chance to visualise what we do. Once we’ve developed a basis of the idea, we send over a complete formal proposal to Germany, and the design team will come up with a finished design.
• Minebea Intec will be exhibiting at PPMA Show 2026 at the NEC, Birmingham from September 22-25.
