The most advanced butter cup ever produced?

From trading company to packaging producer

Moens Mouldings was founded in Amsterdam in 1935 as a trading company and has been making packaging for all kinds of products since 1960. All that time, the Moens family has remained at the helm. A real family business, with no less than 64 years of packaging-making experience! But history certainly does not appear to stand in the way of a drive for innovation. In fact, Moens Mouldings has made innovation its defining characteristic: since 1995, they’ve built all of their manufacturing robots themselves. If you combine this knowledge built up over the years with an unerring gut feeling for evolutions in the market, you get a forerunner in innovative packaging.   

A changing market

Around 2010, managing director Wim Moens sensed that the view on packaging was changing: clients were demanding greener, faster and more economical production. In addition, competitive packaging material that could compete with the European standard was suddenly emerging from countries that were previously not on the packaging radar, such as Indonesia or Thailand. Competition was increasing, so something had to be devised that would allow Moens to distinguish itself.   

The company chose the path of innovation and never looked back. Son Steven's technical knowledge was used to set up an in-house research and development department. With this department set up, Moens succeeded in developing its own robots that could deliver more economical, stronger packaging products. What's more, the new self-developed robots proved to work faster than other models on the market.   

Steven Moens puts it like this: ‘We have been intensively developing this system since 2016, so if you have to start working on it now then you’re already too late. We had to go through many difficult steps: from developing the robots themselves and the FEM (Finite Element Analysis) software, to the 3D scanner that can measure our packaging extremely accurately. But with all of these things combined, we do have a system that works extremely well for us and for our customers.’   

Because Moens Mouldings entered this new playing field early on and everything was developed in-house, many things had to be discovered by trial and error. For example, they soon found out that you cannot keep making the lid of a margarine tub as thin as possible with impunity. Or that the dimensions of a thin-walled packaging can be very different if you lose sight of certain crucial details. Here again, a solution was devised: an advanced 3D scanner that’s used to measure exactly where the packaging is thinner or thicker. This makes it possible to determine which points need to be made stronger and to check whether what comes out of the machine matches the specified design.   

Lighter and stronger thanks to Injection Compression Moulding  

If you pick up a typical plastic tub of margarine from the refrigerator in the shop, there is often a small circle at the bottom with a tiny, pointy dot in the middle. This is the injection point: this is where the plastic was injected into the mould during the production of the container. This is how most plastic containers are still made today, but it can also be a limitation. By injecting plastic only through this one point, you are also tied to an end point. After all, during injection, the plastic is already going to crystallise and harden, so there is a limit to how far you can go in each direction.   

Injection Compression Moulding works differently. Right before the mould is closed and pressurized, a small amount of plastic is injected. This way, the flow path of the plastic can be extended and extra reinforcement can be applied at certain points that were out of reach with normal injection moulding. This additional targeted reinforcement, in turn, allows manufacturers to make other points thinner. This gives packaging developers more freedom in their designs.    

Steven Moens has the concrete figures: ‘The old tubs weighed 14.5 grams and could handle a top load of 34.7 kg. The new version is not only lighter at 12.15 grams, it can also handle a larger top load of up to 41 kg. So we were able to save plastic ánd make the packaging stronger at the same time! That’s the beauty of this technology.’ 

It doesn't stop there, there are even more gains: ‘Production is also much faster. To give you an example: with this method, a lid can be made in 1.3 seconds, where conventional robots take 4 seconds or longer. How that came about? We could see from our data that it could be going faster, so we just went for it. We then did have to build our own special robotic arms, but it was definitely worth it.’  

In the image above, you can already see where the weak points are. At the red point, the packaging goes over its so-called yield strength, which is where deformation occurs. So you can see here that this is the maximum the packaging can take.  

Of course, there’s more than just the software to rely on: ‘We’ve also sent the products to the lab and they come up with an average of 40.7 kg, which is only a 300g difference from what we calculated. That tells us that we can be confident that what the software says will also be correct in the real world.’  

Benefits for the entire chain 

So to recap: we have thinner, lighter AND stronger tubs. That sounds great, of course, but what are the benefits of this for the client?   

‘The stacking height of the tubs used to be 9.9 mm and we were able to reduce this to 6.33 mm with our method. You can imagine that this makes a huge difference on a pallet: instead of 9,900 pieces, it can now fit 15,000 pieces: 30% more tubs per pallet.’  

That 30% difference is then reflected in all facets of the chain, as it also means that 30% less cardboard is needed to transport the packaging itself. 30% fewer trucks are needed for transportation. Companies need 30% less storage to store the packaging until it is ready to be filled. And factory employees spend less time as they only need to bring in 2 pallets instead of 3 pallets. All consequences of one clever little tub.  

Even the label found a way to innovate. Sticking the label right into the spray mould, a technique commonly know as in-mould labelling, has been around for a while. But where the traditional label is a star with five faces, Moens Mouldings has now developed a design that prints onto long strips instead. This leaves less residual waste when the IML sheets are cut. For designers and brands it’s a plus that their design can continue across the packaging without interruptions.   

The future according to Moens   

So what about the further future, if we're thinking about things like bio-based plastics?    

Wim Moens: ‘We are ISCC ++ certified, which means we are already allowed to use a range of existing bio-based materials. We got this certification because we can see that there will be room for this kind of packaging in the market in the future. At the same time you have to keep in mind that our customers currently still pay a surcharge for using this kind of material. Who knows, maybe it will become compulsory in a few years? Then we will be ready to start producing with these materials.’ 

The first steps are already being taken: ‘We are now working with a major customer to market their first product with biobased packaging. This customer expects to use about ten percent bio-based material in about five years' time. So we are definitely working on it and have all the necessary certificates, but there is still a lead time before it gets there. We also expect to start making more different types of packaging: think shampoo bottle caps or other plastic things. That's what's happening at the forefront of the market right now.’