CAMA and Great Lake Cheese Co. - Sponsored Whitepaper

Tray pack for cheese is brimming with benefits Consumers are showing a keen interest in this tray-style packaging concept for sliced, shingled cheese. It’s all about ease of use and convenient re-closeability.

The C-Pak, a three-piece package for sliced, shingled cheese, is helping Great Lakes Cheese Co. win new packaging business, most of which consists of private-label work for retailers who have their own store brands. The innovative re-closable tray consists of a preformed bottom and lid that press together with a friction fit. Between these two parts is a clear flexible film that gets heat-sealed to the inner flange of the tray before the lid is pressed on. The consumer removes the snap- fit lid, peels away the Flexible film lidding, extracts as many slices as desired, and then re-closes the package by snapping the lid back in place. According to GLC package engineering manager Stew Armstrong, GLC is the only user of the C-Pak at this point in time. The concept of the shingled slices of cheese in a rigid tray as opposed to a flexible zippered package is popular in Europe and has been for at least the past five years. But usually the packaging consists of a rigid tray and peel/reseal lidding with no rigid lid like the GLC pack has. “We took the tray concept popular in Europe, ” says Armstrong, “and improved upon it to meet the needs of the U.S. marketplace.” Once trays get past labeling, the two separate streams are merged back into one for transfer to case packing.

Retail-ready Trays of cheese are placed into retail-ready cases. “It’s a wraparound case that’s perforated so that the top and side can be ripped off and the whole retail-ready unit of

Two stacks of six trays each are collated and ready for insertion into a wraparound case

12 can be placed on the store shelf,” says Armstrong. “The C-Pak stands up and displays beautifully in the retail-ready corrugated”. Case erecting and case packing are done on a Model FW749 wraparound system supplied by CAMA GROUP. Its conveyor connections and sweep arms take trayed cheese on a forward, left, forward, left, forward trajectory. Just ahead of the actual case packer is an infeed stacker from CAMA that pivots up and down to stack trays six-high in a flighted conveyor that moves perpendicular and to the left of the infeed stacker. A sweep arm pushes two stacks at a time at a right angle so that a second sweep arm can push the 12 trays of cheese into a case that’s been pulled from a magazine feed and erected. From there the cases are pushed forward so that flaps can be folded and adhesive applied. Cases exiting the CAMA system receive two identical labels: one on the side and one on the trailing edge.