Industry knowhow and technological expertise drive highly effective coffee packaging collaboration
As the core ingredient to one of the world’s favourite beverages, coffee really does make the world go around! Second only to water and tea as a drink, unroasted coffee beans are one of the most traded agricultural commodities in the world. As such a popular global drink, the market forces behind its distribution and presentation are commensurately impressive. Multiple varieties, formats, serving options and packaging solutions give consumers an incredible amount of choice when it comes to purchasing and brewing their vital caffeine fixes.
Keeping pace with demand
This popularity and market demand filters down the supply chain, placing immense amounts of pressure on suppliers, roasters and grinders as they try to keep pace with consumer demand for convenience and new innovations. One such company which has undertaken investment to cater for these varying market forces is Masteroast, one of the UK’s largest independent coffee roaster/packers. Its reputation for high-quality coffee and attractive innovative packaging has allowed it to grow sales in what is a highly competitive retail sector. Following a recent investment in the process and filling side for coffee capsules, the pressure was building to reduce costs and increase throughput on its packaging line. Masteroast’s problem was that its customers wanted different packaging styles, in order to create differentiation in the market. Standard 1 x 10 tube formats for Nespresso-compatible capsules are well recognised, but for a point of difference for the higher-end products, a unique format with more drama and customer engagement was required. To take this next step, Masteroast explored the machine-builder market for a suitable secondary packaging machinery supplier, and subsequently employed Cama, tasking the globally recognised machine builder to develop a solution to its coffee packaging requirements.
Exploiting automation
According to Andy Fawkes, Managing Director at Masteroast: “We’ve always held a unique position in the market, being known for our ability to offer flexibility, short-run capabilities and high levels of quality. When we moved into the capsule market, we knew we had to exploit automation for capacity and cost reasons – but we did not want to give up the flexibility for which we are famous. Cama offered us significant coffee packaging experience, we knew it was already well established in this market and its capabilities to deal with short runs and different packaging formats ticked all of our requirements.”
Mark Brooker, Director of Cama UK, explains: “Working in collaboration with our dedicated packaging design department, Masteroast developed a new box design that comprises a top opening tray with an insert that allows the capsules to be presented similar to a gift box. This approach allows Masteroast to offer a packaging format with a sense of occasion – created by a theatrical product reveal of the contents of the carton.” “Cama really helped us,” Fawkes adds. “We knew the format we wanted, but at the time it did not exist. The packaging design team at Cama helped us with technical advice, even relating to the best types of cardboard, how it was folded and how it was manufactured. The Cama team also talked to our supply chain, helping us to bring it all together.”
Easy changeover
Brooker elaborates: “From a technology perspective, Masteroast needed a machine-based solution that could package both tubes and trays, using a continuous stream of individual products fed from a downstream capsule filling and sealing machine. The machine also had to offer easy changeover, to rapidly adapt it to the different style production runs. As well as delivering the necessary flexibility, this would also make significant contributions to the OEE.” Cama’s solution was one of its Break Through Generation (BTG) machines that incorporates precision feeding of the aluminium capsules, robotic manipulation of capsules into a single row for tubes or a double row for trays, before presenting them to a Cama CL intermittent-motion side load cartoner. Brooker explains: “The key to the flexibility of the line is Cama’s MN (‘Y’ shaped) robot at the infeed. With the innovative design of the robot’s pick head, we have been able to minimise the changeover time between the different packaging formats; both of which can run at 120 capsules per minute.” “One of the reasons we went with Cama was its experience and market knowhow,” Fawkes elaborates. “Cama ended up holding our hand throughout the entire process – from design through roll out and on to implementation. This was a huge comfort factor. “With anything new,” he continues, “there’s always the fear that you don’t get what you ask for, but out of all of the various companies we approached, Cama actually got behind our needs – flexibility and reliability – which was so essential to us. Other companies wanted to talk technology, engineering and price, but in actual fact, our principal need was for someone to understand the flexibility we needed in production. Cama were the ones that listened properly and came back with a solution… not just a quote! “We were the first to introduce aluminium capsules into the UK,” Fawkes explains. “No one had done this before outside of the obvious main players, so we expected teething problems. But Cama stepped up! Its engineers came onsite and worked with our guys to make sure the installation and commissioning went without a hitch. The training support was also very strong. Within four to five weeks we were very comfortable with the machines, and although we like talking to the Cama guys… we haven’t really had to, which is an ideal scenario.”
Saving costs and boosting sustainability
As a result of the investment, Masteroast is now able to pack more than three times as many products per day compared to its previous manual process. The quality and consistency of the packaging has also improved. “We have also seen a reduction in packaging material usage,” Fawkes concludes, “which not only saves costs, but also makes the process more sustainable. A true win-win situation. We would certainly come back to Cama; indeed, we are already looking with them at other processes that currently involve manual packing. The future relationship is bright.”
