Opening Sara Lee’s Desserts is as Easy as Pie
July 2006
When Sara Lee began shrink wrapping pies for higher quality distribution they found themselves facing their next hurdle. How do you safely get shrink-wrap off of a frozen pie without destroying the product? Sara Lee turned to Sealstrip Corporation, the leading provider of easy open solutions for shrink packaging, for some ideas. Having been in the industry for more than 30 years, Sealstrip was up for the challenge of finding an easy open solution that would work for Sara Lee’s frozen pies. We wanted to invest in a system that had, “minimal capital requirements,” -Jeff Burton, Sr. Packaging Engineer, R&D, Sara Lee Foods, and a low per-package cost.
Working together with the Sara Lee packaging engineers, Sealstrip determined that the best way to meet the objective of an easy open feature for the pies, without having to change wrappers or film, was Sealstrip’s Shrinktape® system. Shrinktape is a narrow width (3.4mm), 2mil, pressure sensitive tape that is ideal for enabling an easy open on shrink wrapped products. A red tape was thought to be ideal for this application so that consumers could quickly and easily identify the easy open feature. The high-speed rotary Shrinktape® Applicator was custom built and retrofitted to Sara Lee’s existing SIG Doboy SK shrink wrappers and applies the Shrinktape to the film in-line. The Shrinktape Applicator is designed and built by Sealstrip Corporation to provide affordability, ease of operation and change-over flexibility, while meeting the demands of high-speed, high volume production. The, “easy integration and quick start up of the operator-friendly applicators,” Jeff Burton, was a must for the Sara Lee plant that runs 9 dessert lines, 20 hours a day, 6 days a week.
It’s easy to see why the addition of the Shrinktape easy open feature has been so, “well received by [our] customers,” notes Jeff Burton. The pie should be as easy to open as it is to prepare, consumers shouldn’t have to struggle to get into a dessert that was created to streamline meal preparation time. Sara Lee customers now have a convenient easy to open, easy to prepare dessert from freezer to table.
Customers Contact: Jennifer Conrad, 610-367-6282 ext. 111
Distributors Contact: Barbara Fossum, 610-367-6282 ext. 106