A Lincolnshire packaging machine manufacturer has celebrated a significant milestone this month – supplying its 50th machine into the salad industry.
GIC, which is based in Gainsborough, has been designing and manufacturing vertical form fill and seal packaging machines since 1993 and this month delivered a GIC4100 to Natures Way Foods in Chichester.
As well as being the 50th machine to be sold into the salad industry, the latest delivery is the 26th GIC machine to be bought by Natures Way.
Natures Way Foods, which is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of prepared salads, coleslaw, potato salad, and fresh food to go salad meals, and has used GIC machines since 2009.
Several of Natures Way Foods’ GIC machines feature the company’s unique Leaf Salad Assisted Drop (LSAD) functionality.
Developed in 2018, Leaf Salad Assisted Drop functionality prevents leaves from becoming trapped in the seal, which can cause contamination. By creating an area of low pressure in the product chute, which draws salad leaves down into the bag in one single slug, Leaf Salad Assisted Drop eliminates upstream choking. Without the feature, the product mass often elongates into several clumps of salad leaf, which increases the chances of it being captured in the seal.
As well as preventing contamination, incorporating LSAD functionality increases packing efficiency and allows food companies to reduce film waste.
“We are very proud to have reached this milestone,” says Andy Beal, managing director of GIC. “Natures Way Foods has grown significantly in the time we have been working with them, and we are grateful for their loyalty, like many of our customers, when they’ve increased their capacity by adding more lines, they’ve come back to us and asked us to supply them with additional machines. We like to think that our customers stay loyal because we offer incredibly well built, reliable and efficient machines backed up with excellent customer service. Hopefully, we will continue our upward trajectory and in a few years will be celebrating our 75th or even our 100th machine into the salad industry, and manufacturers continue to buy British!”
Established by the Langmead brothers in 1994, Natures Way Foods employs more than 1,400 people across four manufacturing units capable of producing over 238 million units and handling over 110,000 tonnes of finished product.
