In response to a major customer's request for a better shipping method for unfilled vitamin and supplement bottles, Alpha Packaging has invested in an exclusive new shipping system that eliminates the need for corrugated shipper boxes. Alpha's PERFect-Pack™ system uses layers of perforated plastic bags to form a brick of bagged bottles that can be stacked onto a pallet for economical and convenient shipping.

The PERFect-Pack system has numerous advantages for customers:

• The unique stacking method eliminates wasted head space in corrugated shipper boxes. The space savings enables companies to get more product on every truckload, and fit more bottles into limited warehouse space. It also results in better stacking strength for each pallet.
• It offers improved ergonomics for plant floor personnel since they can handle each layer of bottles separately, instead of handling the entire contents of a 30-pound shipper carton at one time.
• It eliminates the cost, waste and dust associated with corrugated cartons.

What's Different About The PERFect-Pack System?

Plastic bottles for the pharmaceutical and nutritional supplement industries are usually shipped to the fillers in corrugated shipper cartons which are shrinkwrapped onto a pallet. Pallets usually contain 20 cartons for domestic shipments, and each carton weighs an average of 25 to 30 pounds.

Depending on the height and diameter of the bottles, there are frequently several inches of unused head space in each shipper carton; multiplied over hundreds of cartons per truckload, companies can waste significant space on trucks and in their warehouses with cartons not filled to capacity.

When a pallet arrives on the plant floor, packaging line workers must cut open the shipper carton, untie or rip open an interior plastic liner, lift the entire carton off the floor and raise it high enough to dump the contents into a hopper.

With Alpha's PERFect-Pack system, bottles come off the manufacturing line as usual, where they are automatically lined up in a layer of bottles the depth and width of one half of a pallet. But, instead of being packed as a layer into a carton, the PERFect-Pack machine envelopes the batch of bottles in a perforated plastic bag which is precisely the height, width and depth of the layer of bottles. The bag is sealed, and then stacked on a pallet.

When the pallet is full, the entire brick of bottles is shrinkwrapped for shipping. When the pallet arrives at a customer's plant, a plant worker simply removes the outer shrinkwrap and pulls each layer of bottles off the stack. Because the bags are perforated along one seam, the worker simply unzips the bottles and dumps them into the hopper. The waste generated by the plastic bags and shrinkwrap consumes considerably less space than corrugated shipper cartons and liners.

Who Benefits Most From The PERFect-Pack System?

According to Mike DeFazio, Alpha's Vice President, manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, vitamins and nutritional supplements are perfect candidates for Alpha's PERFect-Pack system. "These companies can benefit greatly from the shipping and warehousing efficiencies, and are also very impressed with the ergonomics for their plant personnel," DeFazio says. "And, since these companies are so focused on maintaining dust-free filling environments, they are thrilled to eliminate the dust and contamination of corrugated, along with the cost of its disposal."

DeFazio says that several years ago, one of Alpha's nutritional supplement customers expressed an interest in finding a better way to ship them our bottles. This particular customer fills and labels its bottles in one pass, so we didn't need to worry about their need to repack the filled bottles into Alpha shipper boxes. It really opened up the options for us to think beyond corrugated.

Alpha researched bottle-bagging systems for over a year before finding a supplier who could customize the bagging equipment. Dave Spence, President of Alpha Packaging, says they looked for someone who understood Alpha's focus on customer satisfaction, and who could build the machines to work seamlessly with its packaging operations in both St. Louis and Brooklyn. "Every month we run hundreds of different bottles styles and sizes," Spence says, "and we needed a system that could be flexible as we fill orders for customers. With the new system in place, line changes are fairly simple, although we have minimum order requirements associated with PERFect-Pack." Presently Alpha customers are required to order a full skid of product to take advantage of the PERFect-Pack system.

Alpha is currently using the PERFect-Pack system for 15 different sizes of bottles for several different customers. Based on feedback from those customers, bottles shipped in PERFect-Pack pallets have improved filling operations and dramatically increased the amount of product customers can receive in each shipment.

"One customer is able to get 24% more product in every truckload using pallets of bagged bottles," DeFazio says. "Not every customer will have the same space savings, but when we run numbers for customers who are thinking about PERFect-Pack, they are always impressed with the potential savings."

Alpha Packaging is a leading manufacturer of high density polyethylene (HDPE) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles and jars for the nutritional supplement, pharmaceutical and personal care industries. In addition to manufacturing, Alpha Packaging has tool-making capabilities, from unit body cavity molds to complete high-cavity production tooling. It also offers in-house design on CAD/CAM systems, serving as a strategic industrial design partner for customers in a variety of industries.