Greg McKenna, director of sales, specialty beverage packaging at Graphic Packaging, tells BeverageDaily.com at Pack Expo 2014: “There’s been a lot of light-weighting with glass in the market over the last few years – partitions have been removed to reduce cost.
“What we’re doing with this package is taking the existing material in the bottom of the carton and putting it to use – so customers get the benefit: reduce glass breakage, generate bottom line savings,” McKenna adds.
“Certainly in soft drinks there’s an opportunity for it. Currently, we’re focusing on the brewery business, but even beyond beverage in glass food products there are opportunities for Tite-Pak in the future,” he says.
Explaining in more detail how Tite-Pak works, McKenna says: “We did hundred and thousands of glass breakage tests, and learnt we had to make the package tight – so we make it undersize when we’re packing it, to get the glass to move as a single mass.”
“When the machine packs the bottles we engage a series of shark fins – they look like a fin – using a punch system to punch up from the bottom in between the heels of the glass, to tighten the package still further,” he adds.