In the future, Reichenau-Gemüse, a producer organisation, will pack its tomatoes and apples in cardboard trays without any film and thus without any plastic. An S-shaped viewing slit allows a clear view of the product (see Fig. 2 below).
This innovation is made possible by the development work of Dipl.-Ing .Michael Baur. His company is active as a development service provider for special machine construction.
The starting point of development was the wish of a corrugated board manufacturer to dispense with the usual flow packaging and the use of plastic film. The company launched a competition for ideas, which Michael Baur won. Challenge: bonding without counter pressure and without pressure on the product. In the next step, Michael Baur and his team built a prototype of the newly designed machine. One of the special challenges here was to glue the printed packaging to the top after manually filling it with vine tomatoes: the gluing had to be durable. During the gluing process, however, counter pressure is not possible and, of course, pressure on the sensitive tomatoes must be avoided. An intelligent detailed design was the solution to this problem. The gluing points are applied with a hot glue station, but other processes such as sealing are also conceivable. A station for printing and applying labels has also been integrated into the system. When developing the prototype, Michael Baur attached great importance to flexibility and ease of use. This can be seen immediately from the numerous semi-automatic format adjustments.
