Thermoforming
Thermoforming Food Grade Packaging
The large scale manufacture of thermoformed food grade packaging is what we specialise in. Our 200,000 sq.ft. facility is dominated by our thermoforming production area, where we produce over half a billion thermoformed food grade packaging products annually.
The range of thermoformed products we manufacture include a wide variety of meat trays, poultry trays, dairy spread containers, mushroom punnets, and ready meal trays, many of which are supplied to the largest supermarket chains across the UK and Ireland.
We’ve partnered with Kiefel to ensure we can deliver high commercial volumes of thermoformed packaging in the most efficient and cost effective way, thanks to the superior cutting edge technology we have in place.
Our clients can choose from hundreds of stock products in our range, or we can work with them to create bespoke thermoformed packaging.
We offer a range of choices when it comes to the product design, with the capability of producing thermoformed packaging in a variety of shapes and sizes. Our new product development team are experienced in delivering technical support at every stage of the development process, working closely with the client and the machinery partners from initial concept, through the development process to full production and supply.
Our site is BRC accredited, and we have rigorous QA testing in place throughout the thermoforming process to ensure all products are manufactured to the agreed specification and with consistent high quality output.
The Thermoforming Process
We produce the thin gauge sheet used for our thermoformed packaging through our in-house sheet extrusion technology.
The sheet then goes through the thermoforming line, which first heats the plastic sheet to the right temperature, ensuring it is pliable enough for reshaping.
The heated plastic sheet then moves to the forming process, where it is placed in moulds. Vacuum is applied to remove any air, and to tightly pull the sheet onto the mould, ensuring the detail of the mould is transferred to the plastic.
The moulded plastic is air ejected from the moulds, before moving to the next stage of the process, the trimming. Trimming is when the formed plastic is cut from the remaining sheet, giving us the finished thermoformed product.
For some products, such as dairy spread containers, this is then followed by the decoration process to provide the finished, branded product.
