When one of our major international wholesaling customers approached us during January of this year with a project to produce a new thermoformed clamshell pack for an Easter egg range, one or two of our design team became really excited at the prospect of sampling lots of chocolate! The excitement was to prove short lived when they realized that there was a 2 week timeframe to design the clamshells, get them approved and into full production to hit an early March delivery date of finished clam packs, so no time for nibbling!
The customer supplied a blank carton that the egg had to fit into along with a selection of chocolates that had to be displayed along with the egg rather than hidden away inside it. The first job the Macpac Real3D design team had to do was put together accurate measurements of the egg and chocolate products.
Painstaking measurements taken with vernier calipers and gauges were fed into the SolidWorks CAD CAM design software. The figures were used to generate shapes for incorporation into a pack design. At this stage the product can be integrated into the design to show how the finished pack complete with product could look.
Graphics for the carton can even be added if the customer chooses this option. A lot of our customers value this service, as they are able to make slick marketing presentations that simplify and speed up the final design choice. Once the design was approved the design shape co-ordinates were fed into the CNC machine tool where a block of specially made resin was then machined into the shape of the tool required to make the thermoformings. This process took several hours after which time prototypes were hand made on a sampling machine. The samples were then paired with the Easter egg and chocolate products and sent to the customer for approval. Once approved the final tooling was machined on the CNC lathe but this time from high grade Aluminium.
Skilled pattern makers then added the finishing touches that would ensure really high clarity of the finished packs as well as accurate fit for the products. Once the in-house tooling was completed a cutting forme was made to precisely cut the packs as they came off the final production run.
One of our Illig RD53c pressure forming machines was chosen to run the job on so that the 10,000 required units could be manufactured quickly and efficiently to meet the deadline.
The entire project took less than 3 weeks from initial brief to delivery of finished goods ensuring sufficient shelf time at the point of sale for our customer, which was just about long enough for our design team to be thoroughly fed up with the thought of eating any more chocolate eggs! This type of project is fairly typical of the bespoke work that Macpac undertake, particularly in the food industry. Our in-house design and tooling facility speeds up the manufacturing process and gives greater control over cost, production times, quality and reliability. We are able to add value at every stage of the process, which is why we have so many really great and loyal customers.
