The joint venture between Italy’s Carle & Montanari and OPM, providing an Italian ‘hub’ for chocolate and confectionery packaging, shared exhibition space jointly for the first time at the ProSweets fair in Cologne, at the end of January.
First announced in March 2011, the alliance enable the full production process from raw materials, cocoa processing, moulding and flow wrapping, to final palletizing.
“Reaction to the joint venture has been good,” said the company’s area sales manager Paolo Borgna. “Customers are all reducing their budgets for engineering, and our JV allows them to have suppliers for the whole process in the same place.
“They can almost completely forget the project once it has begun.”
The group also provides synergies across fields other than engineering, Borgna added, including accounting and purchasing.
“Our expertise is enhanced by merging our companies,” he said. “From a sales point of view, we are now covering the whole world with a large team.”
At ProSweets, the group showed the latest evolution of its EVO flow wrapper, first presented at InterPack in May 2011; the 5-roll HFI518 refiner for chocolate hollow figures; the MLE650 chocolate piston dispenser, in which all the parts in contact with chocolate can be replaced in a toll-less operation in less than 10 minutes; and a secondary packing cell based on a tri-functional OPM robot.
While the two companies continue with separate marketing in the short-term, dual activities and a new web platform are being planned for the second half of 2012.
