Necessity's Child

Five years ago, in early 2003,  Hershey changed the wrapper on the standard size 1.55 oz. chocolate bar from the long standing and well recognized paper and foil over chocolate, to what is known as a “fin-seal” or “flow” wrapper.  While the fin-seal certainly helped protect the chocolate, and also increase production capacity, the change did not initially sit well with many of Hershey’s loyal customers.  However, the positive aspects of the new wrapper, like keeping the chocolate air tight and fresh tasting, certainly outweigh the change in appearance.

Needless to say, this change in the Hershey’s standard chocolate bar wrapper presented a pretty serious challenge for our production of custom wrapped Hershey’s bars here at CARSON.  Although we have utilized actual Hershey’s wrapping machines for many years, until 2003 our wrapping machine simply put our custom paper wrapper over top of the Hershey paper wrapper/foil combo, and it made a perfect presentation for our customers.

Thankfully, CARSON also had the ability to put foil on the bars with our wrapping machine, and after much readjusting we were able to use our machine to put both foil and our custom wrapper over top of the new Hershey’s fin-seal bar and make it look perfect once again. 

There was a catch however.  The new fin-sealed Hershey’s bars had crimped tabs on each end which had to be folded and taped back in order to re-wrap the bar with our wrapping machine.  That may not sound like a large hurdle if you only wrap a couple hundred bars a day, but when you wrap several thousand bars a day like we do at CARSON, the chore became quite a cumbersome challenge.

Finally, it was decided that we needed to find a solution that would replace the manual taping back of the fin-sealed ends because we just could no longer keep up with demand.  So last October, I attended the Food Packaging and Machinery Expo in search of a solution where others have failed before.

I arrived at the expo and was utterly shocked by how large this convention and exposition was as I tried to figure out just where to start.  Now you have to remember, I do not have an engineering or machinery background in any way, so I started out with one big strike against me.

After walking the span of several football fields of machinery and packaging options for just about everything you could imagine, I started to narrow down my search to those who dealt with adhesive tapes and the machinery that applies such material.  I spent a lot of time talking with the group from Boshe who now owns the company that made our wrapping machines, Sigpack.  Boshe makes machinery for many types of industries worldwide, and Sigpack focuses on packaging solutions for many types of food and candy companies.  These people really know what they are doing and understood our situation very well.  It was after spending time with them mulling over our circumstances and need for a solution, I went in search of machinery that applied adhesive materials.

I found Nautilus Systems, and with my Hershey bar in hand explained my quest.  Steve Gunnerson and Eric Moore from Nautilus immediately felt as if they had a solution. Using existing technology they have had in place for many years, they could devise a machine that would apply adhesive tape squares to hold back the crimped ends of the bar.  To make a very long story from here very short, Nautilus did exactly what they proposed to do, and jumped all the hurdles to create a machine that will do in 10 minutes what would take us an hour to do by hand.

This new machine could not have come to us at a better time, and the first day it was installed and our team was trained to use it, we quickly put it into service because we had an order for 5000 bars and another for 3000 that had to ship out that day. 
Raleigh Sanderson, and engineer with Nautilus Systems, flew from Phoenix to train our team on how to use the machine.

In the CARSON facility right now, the new “Tape Machine” is the champ, the King, the bomb, the beast, whack, and any other superlative you can think of, all rolled up into one!