Trends in Display Packaging

With over 45 years experience under our belt we have seen first hand how the requirements of display packaging have changed as time has gone by.

Back in 1977 when Yorkshire Packaging Systems was founded, if you wanted to shrink wrap your product from a presentation point of view you would have used PVC shrink film on at best a semi-automatic L sealer and shrink tunnel, and more likely just a very basic manual system. Shrink wrapping at this time was certainly a very labour intensive operation.

The late 1980’s and into the early 1990’s saw the introduction of the first polyolefin shrink film in the UK and more automated L sealers which could accept and wrap products automatically. Both changes were equally important for giving better results for display applications as the new polyolefin shrink films were cleaner, stronger and more machineable allowing them to operate on the first generation of automatic L sealers.

As a result of improved automation, there was an explosion of automatic L sealers onto the market because if you had the volume of product to shrink wrap you could do so at three times the speed and half the labour. As these machines grew in popularity, so did the use of polyolefin shrink films to the extent that in a 20 year period PVC went from being the dominant display shrink film by a margin (90% of the market) to virtually non-existent.

YPS have been at the forefront of these changes and are now number one in the UK market for the supply of polyolefin shrink film with a complete range of films from respected manufacturer Bollore. In addition, with recent demands to even faster machinery, we have been able to report a sharp intake of orders for our latest model of horizontal side sealers. These modesls incorporates many new innovate features such as a touch screen intuitive menu system making it far easier to operate and a split infeed belt making product detection on even the thinnest of packs 100% reliable.

The costs of higher speed equipment has fallen dramatically over the last five years and so now we find we are supplying in many cases high speed side sealing equipment to applications where five years ago an automatic L sealer would have been the preferred choice. A good example of this is a recent double order won at BT, for shrink wrapping their range of Home Hub products which has replaced a number of older generation automatic L sealers.

The future it would seem is to continue the trend towards ever more flexible and faster shrink wrapping equipment – something we are happy to help with at YPS!