Pet food

A growing concern among pet owners regarding their pet's health has increased their expenditure on nutritious pet foods. They are essentially looking for specialized and higher quality pet food. This had led to a radical increase in the production and diversification of pet foods worldwide and the related packaging.

Increasing preference for functional and fortified pet food products is a major trend. Premiumization has also led to a number of innovations in the flavors of pet products with recipes showing a strong influence of human dining. This has provided a great base of expansion for the pet food packaging market globally. It has increased the importance of packaging which needs to convey all the health related messages including the premiumization and the growing number of references in a market willing to speed up the time to market and to surf on fashions.

The packaging demand for pet food includes coated paper bags, barrier laminate bags, PP woven bags, PET folding boxes and tubes and PE film bags. Plastic pouches are becoming more widespread and popular for wet, frozen and refrigerated pet food, though cans still dominate for wet food products. Single-serve wet pet food packaging demand is growing with the inscrease of small breed dogs. Easy opening and reclosing of pet food packaging is in growing demand in urban areas driving new packaging designs and requiring new premium production capabilities.

The growth in pet food variants combined with new life style is raising demand for online sales pet food. Connected consumers especially millennials are looking for easy and bulk purchase of pet food. This new sales channel for pet food is growing demand for corrugated boxes packaging.

Pet food print requirements have grown significantly in the recent years and in some markets and geographies, pet food packaging is almost as demanding as human food across folding carton, flexible packaging, label and corrugated boxes. BOBST's CI presses for flexible materials can handle all plastic films and laminates used for the production of pet food. Whilst delivering consistently superior quality across all run lengths, the presses allow for fastest change-over which ensures an unmatched productivity even with the shortest runs. The MASTER RS 6003 and EXPERT RS 6003, gravure printing presses with the unique Twin Flow drying system is specially suited for pet food applications. The MASTER M5 and MASTER M6 inline UV flexo presses deliver high printing quality along with total food safety thanks to the unique UV Track system that tests and tracks the UV inks safety across the whole surface of the substrate during printing. The BOBST EXPERT K5 can produce more rolls per day and provides significant cost saving innovations. The BOBST VISION K5 is able to handle many different film types including heat sensitive and thin gauge substrates. Processes, like the DarkNight used to for reducing pinholes in the film, and the Alubond for better metal adhesion guarantee the pet food is protected appropriately. The VISION D 850 LAMINATOR is an industry benchmark in terms of output quality, while the MASTER TX 1000 LAMINATOR is a favorite of converters for production of retortable pouches and packaging of humid pet food which requires triplex composite structures. The BOBST flexo trolley is often the coating system of choice, enabling to coat the adhesive directly on the aluminum substrate at high speed.

Brand owners and packaging designers creating striking differentiation and premiumization for their products require high-end technologies. Hot foil stamping is indeed a great way to make a product stand out. With almost fifty years of experience in the design and manufacture of foil stamping machines, BOBST has remained constantly at the forefront of advances in this technology. When it comes to high foiling quality and productivity, MASTERFOIL 106 PR delivers exactly this. Designed for longer impressions, this hot foil stamping machine will deliver huge savings in foil usage. The pet food market is becoming very segmented and packages take numerous shapes. BOBST die cutting solutions are ideal in such demanding markets. Even high volume production finds a solution with the most automated and productive die-cutter MASTERCUT 145 PER capable to run up to 9'500 sheets/hour. This high speed die-cutter delivers fast, uninterrupted production and a superb quality of the finished product. When it comes to flat-bed die-cutting of corrugated board and litho-lam, the MASTERCUT 1.7/2.1 is the pioneering solution that delivers higher running speeds, fewer stops, shorter make-readies, and matchless quality. With the most versatile and productive folder-gluer MASTERFORLD 110, BOBST offers the perfect configuration to deal with this challenge. The EASYFEEDER / BATCH INVERTER 4 will feed the blanks faster and easier. The in-line inspection system ACCUCHECK will guarantee zero-fault packaging. The devices SPEEDWAVE 3 -for crash-locks and SPEEDHOOK -for 4 & 6-corners will save you time and deliver exceptional folding quality; while the high performance packer CARTONPACK 4 increases your productivity by automatically filling your shipping containers.

In case pet food products are packed in a tray type table top display, the printing must match the flexible packaging quality which often leads to offset printing. Then a laminated board solution is needed to combine the offset printing with the strength of corrugated board. The MASTERFLUTE TOUCH Inline laminating solution provides highly efficient production lines for litho-laminated corrugated board. For brown boxes required for the gilds in transit, the BOBST FFG 8.20 EXPERT is the industry benchmark in terms of speed and fast order change for a fully automated complete line.