Lorenzo Birro, Key Account Manager at Cama Group, gives us a deep insight into the mindset of a market leading packaging-technology company, and how its solutions are the result of decades of experience across multiple applications
Can you start by giving us a brief introduction to Cama Group and its role in the baking industry?
CAMA is a packaging technology company that has been supporting international customers – big and small – since 1981. Its core business is the design, engineering and production of high-technology secondary and tertiary packaging systems and complete turnkey lines for customers in both the food and non-food markets.
Spending 5% of its annual turnover on research and development has put it in a very capable position to conquer the world’s most complex packaging challenges, with over 3,400 machines installed globally, many at multi-site installations for the world’s biggest companies and consumer brands. But Cama is also equally at home supporting smaller companies with their similarly challenging packaging issues.
With such a broad spread of technologies and a class-leading machine portfolio, Cama can deliver exactly what customers need, based on their precise product-and-packaging requirements. For the bakery industry it can offer multiple secondary formats, including sleeves, hinged-lid boxes, cartons, display boxes, wraparound formats and RSC boxes. And for tertiary packaging it offers RSC, display boxes and wraparound formats.
Can you share insights into the latest innovations or trends in packaging for bakery products?
An example of a major recent innovation, which is set to gain significant traction in the bakery industry, is the use of labels to replace flow wrapping. Cama’s new labelling technology can replace multi-pack flow wraps with labels that secure individual products in shelf-ready collations. Typical applications include individual cake bars, wafers, chocolate bars, noodle packs or wet wipes, all of which can be secured together by a common shared label and then ‘broken off’ individually and used/consumed as required.
The primary packaging is still required to maintain product integrity, but the secondary stickers or labels use the same chemical family as the primary packaging, which means they can be recycled in the same process.
This move to mono-material packaging is a major first step to making waste collection and recycling more effective. Another advantage of this approach is the flexibility it gives to branding and marketing as the stickers/labels can be printed on demand – even lineside – and easily tailored to discrete batches.
To reinforce the potential of this technology, Cama is currently developing a highly integrated turnkey packaging line for a large multi-national customer that combines the ability to collate and package individual products into shelf-ready cases or as labelled multi packs into shipping cases. Not only does this solution handle multiple case styles, but its modular design flexibility means it can more easily adapt to available factory real estate. Changeover is also tool-free and both packaging processes are highly optimized, ensuring that they do not compromise the speed of any upstream processes.
How do you see automation reshaping the bakery industry, particularly in terms of efficiency and product quality?
Like many global industries, the bakery industry is facing challenges related to employee availability and skill levels. A lack of employee availability at reliable, repeatable and sustainable levels has led to a growing demand for end-of-line automation for traditionally manual cartoning and case packing operations; however, a lack of suitable skills is often falsely seen as a barrier to the uptake of some more advanced automation solutions.
Cama, as an end-of-line specialist, has solutions to both challenges, in terms of its full portfolio of end-of-line packaging technologies and its ability to incorporate highly intuitive VR/AR-driven operation/maintenance and RFID-coded changeover routines into its machines, which make significant inroads into removing human error from batch-based machine reformatting.
Indeed, by removing human error and making changeovers slicker and more easily performed, Cama is able to keep downtime to an absolute minimum, which boosts operational equipment effectiveness (OEE) figures, a key operational metric in every market, not just bakery.
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Joseph Clarke
Editor, International Bakery
Tel: +44 (0) 1622 823 920
Email: editor@in-bakery.com
