Flexible secondary packaging for Middle East and North Africa

A fully automatic system to top load both box and cartoning machine.
(video: Cama)

by Ferdinando Salaris

The MENA area (Middle East and North Africa): productivity in food with automation

(IM) – The Western and Arab worlds are getting closer and closer and one of the meeting points is food production, which is growing at an important but variable level, for which production plants that are adaptable to this dynamic market are a must.
Cama with Industrial Meeting analyzed the needs of the sector giving priority to flexible secondary packaging, scalable and highly productive solutions.

Renato Dell’Oro (Cama’s Area Sales Manager for the Middle East) explains how important the preliminary analysis is for a flexible secondary packaging plant. “The market is expanding. It moves towards automatic packaging systems when until yesterday automation was the simple insertion of products in bags or in the flowpack to abandon manual operations. With the growth of volumes and ever faster production times, manual work is now impossible despite the low cost of labor. The automatic systems eliminate the confusion of large-scale production that has to manage shifts of dozens of people who take turns for repetitive work that generates errors, also due to not always adequate preparation“.

GDO pushes toward the search for flexibility

“The quality of the packages, the attention to display boxes, high quantities and rapid production times with continuous variability are typical requests from large-scale distribution whose market share becomes increasingly important” explains Renato Dell’Oro, “which can be answered using automatic machines with great performance and flexibility in format change. In the secondary packaging, the boxes were formed by hand, now in the flexible secondary packaging they are automatic operations with the large-scale retail trade that wants perfectly packaged products on the shelves “.

When building a production plant for food, variations during production must be taken into account. We start from a program that is then modified by new needs and flexibility must be the basis of everything.
“The design of a plant must be intelligent and variable. Our solutions are designed with flexibility as a feature. If you choose a monolith machine when you have to change format it becomes extremely expensive. The flexibility is different from the automation of the Fordist school which did the same operations for 24 hours. The prerogatives of Cama are modularity, the combination of machines and robots to have a high performance production system already foreseen by the design “.

“Cama machines are equipped with format change without tools. In addition, you can have automatic format change, an option to be used if the operation cannot be performed manually.
Cama is not limited to technical solutions but also provides support in the development of product packaging“, explains Renato Dell’Oro, “we provide automatic machines that improve what was previously done by hand. Furthermore, we educate customers on how to carry out the design of the box packaging that must contain a certain number of products and also improve performance in production”.

How to design a secondary packaging solution

“During the design it is important to choose the material (such as cardboard) for the production. Good packaging is achieved with a good machine but also with quality material “explains Renato Dell’Oro.
“We prepare the customer from the choice of materials to how to design the package when this specific know-how is not present. Those who know wrap around systems know how to choose the material and design the blank. Our packaging office helps in the study of the first sampling for the package layout, guiding the customer to obtain the best result avoiding errors in materials and in the design of the blank “.
“With the pandemic, social distancing was necessary which rewarded the most efficient, productive and safe plants. Going into detail, one of the sectors that is growing well is the bakery, with growing investments for the restart after the pandemic”.

The MENA area (Middle East – North Africa): investments and prospects

We have to divide the MENA area between the Middle East and the Mediterranean area of North Africa. The Middle East area has investments in plants linked to the resources coming from the crude oil fields which have recently suffered a depreciation.
The North African area, on the other hand, has other kinds of problems, in particular socio-political ones that generate economic uncertainty and sometimes make investment projects in technological development difficult.
The market for automatic packaging machines in the MENA area is certainly of great importance and the prospects are very interesting also in anticipation of the growth of the entire area.
“Our solutions are designed to pack products with primary packaging with flexible secondary packaging” continues Renato Dell’Oro. “They can be cases, boxes with three flaps, display cases, to name a few. Our machines cover a large part of production needs and the trust of our local customers is important as well as technology to create the plants“.
The project must provide flexibility: “the product arrives, we apply the robotic solution by loading the products into the boxes we have formed. This is the concept in a nutshell. The way in which the robot takes the product, how it rotates its head, and all the other details are part of our know-how to obtain the best, most efficient and flexible solution for the manufacturer “explains Renato Dell’Oro.

User friendly and Monobloc solutions for the daily use

Cama’s proposal starts from monobloc solutions, machines designed to receive products from one or more flowpacks, with boxes formed starting from the flat cardboard. The formed box, with the lid open, goes to the loading area where the indexed products arrive with the two or three axis robot operator. The concept of the application is that the ordered products are taken, deposited in the cashier and the package is closed. All this with the monobloc island, the only structure with the advantage of having small dimensions and the operator who only has to change the format.
The monoblock solutions are foolproof starting from the protection of the format change: if I am working with the recipe X which provides for certain formats with specific heads, it will not be possible to modify or alter the setting, thus avoiding damage and production blocks.
User friendly is the adjective of Cama solutions. These measures protect against human error even with high-performance machines capable of creating very complex solutions even if the staff has not been perfectly trained.
In addition, for the markets of the MENA area, the control panels are in Arabic to facilitate operations even if it is possible to have different languages as needed.
To facilitate maintenance operations, diagnostic systems are also used with the possibility of remote intervention and augmented reality give great added value to the systems, their daily management and maintenance itself.

Great performance for Wrap around solutions respecting the circular economy

“Our target is a large-scale industry that has a complex project for which a standard solution is not good but must be tailor-made” continues Renato Dell’Oro.
Wrap around solutions are gaining momentum and are gradually replacing applications on American boxes to design display cases that are increasingly useful for the orderly display of content.
The wrap around is also growing in the MENA area: it starts with the flat cardboard using it less and less and those who are attentive to the environment prefer it. This system also allows efficiency, savings and the quality of the flexible secondary packaging preferred by the GDO; in addition, the increasingly widespread concept of production according to the dictates of the circular economy is respected.

The sectors of interest in the MENA area, on which to focus waiting for EXPO 2021

Cama covers the entire food and non-food market with transversal solutions for each sector. Surely a sector of great interest is the flexible secondary packaging in the bakery: the producers are numerous and the biscuit is a very widespread product and in this geographical area there are no problems that can be encountered for example in the processing of chocolate considering the ambient temperatures.

“In production, small products with high volumes of between 3,000-4,000 pieces per minute must be packaged in the flow pack and then in the box” continues Renato Dell’Oro.

“An important market is that of dairy; we are working hard to grow in this niche. The big producers with large production capacities for which our technological solutions are excellent. We do not underestimate the production of ice cream, which is very important even though it is not yet particularly widespread also due to the cold chain. Certainly, lines of a certain capacity justify the investment, furthermore we take into account that the production of ice cream in this geographical area is continuous and not seasonal as in Europe where it is complicated to make an investment in secondary packaging for ice cream, working with two peaks a year. To enter the MENA area, the bakery was important for us as a first step. Sectors such as confectionery, ice cream, a little less pet food which if for us it is an important market, for the MENA area it is still in its first steps“.
The year 2021 is the year of the EXPO in Dubai. Investments will be important for such an event and will certainly be an important driving force for the entire area which is growing both in terms of quantity and technology used.

Flexible secondary packaging for MENA area: language and culture to assist local customers

Cama provides support and assistance directly from the parent company with its experts together with Renato Dell’Oro in person who explains that “great importance is given to the explanation of the solutions and efficiency advantages that are obtained with our systems. There are no intermediaries and the parent company intervenes directly to give prompt and quick answers to the interlocutors who have to set up a production plant. With today’s tools it is easy to meet the customer directly for quality work, with a personal relationship, which is important when a solid relationship is essential to establish a mutual trust “.

During the development of projects with customers in the area, Cama is organized with collaborators originating from the MENA area who are present in the technical office for the project management phase; the same applies to the entire project and during the assistance phase when it is necessary to have people who speak the same language and have the same culture to be a partner available to customers with their language and their culture.
“Surely the experience in packaging for companies such as Multinationals in the Food and Non-Food sector with modern and performing solutions is of great value. This type of references are an excellent business card to win the trust of local customers and often, telling about the applications created by treating similar products, helps the customer in his development projects.
We are usually very present in the area by participating in Gulfood Manufacturing, we participate in Djazagro and in the program there is also Food Africa to make people understand how important this important geographical area is for Cama” concludes Renato Dell’Oro: “In fact, many customers of this same area also meet us during the interpack fair in Duesseldorf which is undoubtedly the great international event where many contacts are generated for our technical proposal with high-end solutions“.

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