Cardboard cores in meat facilities
Hello all,
We are a packaging manufacturer. We supply shrink bags for meat products, winding the bags onto a core to make a roll of perforated bags.
We are looking to change our cores from plastic to cardboard, but i've been told vaguely that cardboard cores won't be allowed in the boning room/packing room, so if we change, our customers will not accept it.
Can anyone who works in a meat processing facility please confirm or deny this?
The idea has *apparently* been brought up with customers before, so i've been advised by the Account Manager not to bother asking again.
We did one have customer who requested cardboard cores to be used, so we did use them. I can't understand why that customer is "allowed" to use them and everyone else isn't...
Can someone please help me understand it?
Thank you in advance.
Hi,
I believe your are talking about the inside cores of rolls of packaging materials.
The roles which are mounted on the machines and turn to release the material/foil for packaging.
There is a lot of friction on those cores. Cardboard cores will not last and frey/crumble/tear. They are also not able to be cleaned. So you are introducing multiple contamination risks into your process.
Plastic cores are also not infallible btw, I had plastic cores in the past that would scratch against the machine and create plastic dust in our high care.
Hello all,
We are a packaging manufacturer. We supply shrink bags for meat products, winding the bags onto a core to make a roll of perforated bags.
We are looking to change our cores from plastic to cardboard, but i've been told vaguely that cardboard cores won't be allowed in the boning room/packing room, so if we change, our customers will not accept it.
...
Can someone please help me understand it?
...
Generally speaking, materials that cannot be rendered sanitary are to be avoided. Wood and cardboard fall in that group because they're porous and absorbent, so they'll pick up and move any contamination they come in contact with.
We still use packing tape and heat transfer labels with cardboard cores in a few areas, but not on anything meant to be a product contact surface.
I assume this is for cost savings? Charge your customer a $5.00 core charge for the upgrade. Also, I have seen very few unwinding operations that don't wither use live mandrels or some form of driven method which should eliminate any risk of friction and any rubbing of anything in a production area needs to be fixed to eliminate that risk. All of the paper we use for our products comes on paper cores and we have virtually no debris from them in our unwinding processes.
Thanks for the helpful responses.
Just to clear things up - the cores are for finished product (our finished product which are shrink bags on a roll), the customer then unwinds by hand and removes one bag at a time for packing meat.
It's not a cost saving measure for us to move to cardboard cores, rather a supply issue (current supplier will soon stop producing plastic cores). We can find a new supplier but we already have a supplier of cardboard cores so wanted to stick with them if possible.
I think we will just find a new supplier of plastic cores.
Cardboard is to be avoided generally where there are open products, especially in wet environments, but may be acceptable if it had some sort of resistance to water such as by a wax coating.
If I was your customer I would be fairly upset if you switched to a cardboard core, so if you don't want to approach the customer to discuss then find a new supplier of your plastic cores.
Kind regards,
Tony