Core values are at the heart of everything Cama Group does. The company strives to establish a long-term partnership with its customers, to ensure that its machines are as efficient as possible and to deliver safe, sustainable packaging systems.
Cama's engineers have many years of experience and technical know-how, which they apply to the development of its innovative machines for the production of environmentally friendly packaging.
We saw that our knowledge and skills could help our customers make the transition from plastic to cardboard. At the beginning, we just followed the market trends. But now we are in a position to offer our customers solutions for things they have not even thought of.
An opportunity to innovate came from a vegan chocolate supplier who wanted to replace its single-use plastic packaging with cardboard envelopes. This was a brand with a premium price, which needed to be reflected in the packaging and product quality. It was an interesting project because the packaging was completely new to us.
Nobody packs chocolate in a cardboard box, or at least not except for very high-end consumers. We started with the packaging, because that was already specified, and we built the machine around it. We were happy with the result, because we delivered the machine to Cama's standard of high operational efficiency and changed it from semi-automatic to automatic. The wrapper is a recycled plastic film. There is no single use plastic.
Projects developed at Cama also take sustainability issues into account. One example of this principle is a project undertaken for a co-packer working with a large global confectionery brand. The challenge here was a spherical chocolate product that relied upon a plastic insert to both support the confectionary in transit and present it to the customer. Cama’s solution was to replace the plastic insert with a special cardboard design. Once the customer’s existing Cama machine was modified by Cama, the spherical chocolate was neatly packaged using the cardboard insert which was designed to ensure no perceived difference to the product presentation in the carton. Our clever design provided the customer with more sustainable packaging and removed another piece of single-use plastic from the supply chain.
A similar level of sustainable design can be seen in another Cama project for a confectionery supplier to a global coffee shop chain. The challenge for this client was to replace the thermoformed plastic trays and inferior film lid used to package a lollipop-shaped ice cream. Initially, the customer only approached us to automate their packaging process, but we also suggested a cardboard alternative to the poor quality materials they were currently using. We took a more sustainable approach and developed a carton tray with special cuts, folds and slots to orient the confectionery in the same way as the original plastic tray. The flow pack replacement was designed for maximum shelf life and cold chain requirements.
The result of our redesign was a higher quality, more rigid pack. This innovative and unique packaging design delivered a better product and removed even more single-use plastic from secondary packaging.
