Packaging: Greiner, RPC bring clever new products to Interpack

Düsseldorf, Germany—Austrian packaging processor Greiner brought a number of innovative new rigid packaging options to the Interpack trade show, held April 24-30 in Düsseldorf, Germany. One package shown to MPW by Greiner’s Kenneth Boldog, market product manager, includes a thermoformed top cup and an injection molded bottom cup, both of polypropylene but the bottom using clarified material. The top cup contains yogurt, and the bottom contains a small toy. Both cups are wrapped with a paper label. The first commercial customer is a European dairy.

Another new package from the firm involved a thermoformed cup that is entirely wrapped, to include the bottom, but a paper label. The paper is thick enough to fold across the bottom. This bottom, says Boldog, makes it very easy for bar coding, and therefore speeds food stores’ logistics and checkout. He says Greiner is in talks with a number of large food packagers regarding this second package.

Competing rigid packaging processor RPC brought a number of new package solutions to Interpack, but probably the most novel was the Gizmo, a pressurized device incorporated into a closure of a container which, when opened, releases under pressure (so also mixes) the active ingredients into the beverage or other product. MPW opened one at the RPC stand, and can easily picture children enjoying the sudden surprise as the pressure is released. Unfortunately RPC would not let the closure leave its stand, so its components remain a bit of a mystery. Shedding some light, Gizmo marketer, Gizmo Packaging Co., has a video that shows how the closure works at its website.

The Gizmo at RPC’s Interpack stand was white and attached—apparently molded along with—the standard beverage bottle closure. The Gizmo-equipped closures are to be molded at RPC’s facility in Lohne, Germany; MPW visited there some years ago and saw the impressive molding/assembly line then being tested for what was to be the Tassimo coffee tablets for Kraft Foods.—[email protected]