Diary Case Study

Rose Forgrove Multi-Packs Müller Dairy Pots and Rices

Nottingham based, Rose Forgrove, renowned designer and manufacturer of affordable, flexible, high quality, high-speed flowrappers, recently installed two of its Merlin Flowpak™ flowrappers into Müller Dairy’s Market Drayton facility in Shropshire. Rose Forgrove Merlins, which are complementing a number of Minerva machines, are being used to pack Müller’s new format two-on-two and three-on-three multi-packs of Müller Corner Fruit, Müllerlight and Müllerrice for major supermarket chains.

Being relatively light products and located on a card base, smooth operation was deemed to be vital to the success of this new flowrapping operation. The Merlin, which boasts smooth product transfer from entry to exit points, ensures that Müller’s collations of tasty snacks are transferred through the crimp jaws in a compact configuration. Moveover, the Merlin’s crimp carryover unit also ensured that the final pack complement exits the line in a well presented, close wrapped pack together with its card base insert. With production throughput of 1.4 billion pots/year, there was little room for teething troubles when the machines were brought on-line. Pre-commissioning trials, which were carried out on Merlin flowrappers at Rose Forgove’s manufacturing facility, proved the Merlin’s worth for this application and paved the way for successful integration into Müller’s own production lines.

According to Peter Glover, Repack Technical Manager of Müller (UK) Ltd., the Rose Forgrove Merlin flowrappers are “achieving speeds of approximately 45 multi-packs/minute, saving 50% on flowrapping costs compared to the alternative card outer format, and are seen as fit for purpose as well as good value for money”. Furthermore, Peter Glover continues, “we operate with a high confidence level in planned production targets being easily achieved by the Rose Forgrove machines”, “they operate efficiently and reliably.” and, “the Merlin has proved to be very flexible, offering wide product size ranges.”