Good packaging is halfway to a sale

"Most innovations start out as clever ideas that look good in presentations, make sense on the spreadsheet and appear irresistible in the business plan," says Christopher Tuchscherer, manager of the Coveris Innovation Center in Halle (Germany). He points out, however, that converting these to practical commercial reality is the actual challenge. Using the "Coveris Fast-Track-Innovation" concept developed in house, the feasibility of packaging conceived by the customer can be tested in the early stages of development and made-to-measure solutions can be found.
To this end, a production zone has been created with modern packaging machines on an area of over 400 m². It features a thermoformer, a traysealer and two tubular bag machines, making it possible to test and validate all the types of packaging that are standard in the industry.

In addition to the production zone, an area has been provided for workshops and seminars. Coveris has designed this area deliberately as an open space to facilitate discussion and the communication and exchange of knowledge and expertise. "Customised seminars and workshops are organised for internal and external target groups and are hosted by in-house specialists at Coveris," says Christopher Tuchscherer.
In the EMEA region, Coveris operates 26 branches employing a total of 4 200 people. The head office of the Coveris Group is in Vienna. Its Innovation Center is intended to offer "added value to packaging development" ranging from the choice of raw material to sustainable solutions in the context of the circular economy. Customers can perform test runs on the industrial packaging machines in the production zone without having to interrupt their own production operations. "This gives us an opportunity to join forces with the customers and work together on the packaging design of the future," underlines Christopher Tuchscherer.

One particularly successful example of the innovativeness of Coveris was realised for pet food manufacturer C&D Foods in Spain and Portugal. The impetus for this was the condition that all plastic packaging in the European Union must be recyclable or reusable by 2030 under a European strategy for plastics. Many companies are already aiming to meet this target by 2025, however.