When Packaging World visited Romance Foods in December, the maker of cooked sauce and pasta was filling Sargento Foods’ new Pizza Creations!™ pizza sauce on a vertical form/fill/seal machine.
Sauce packs are hot-filled at about 45/min on an older machine from Key-Pak Machines (Lebanon, NJ). As film unwinds toward the machine’s forming collar, a Markem (Keene, NH) unit ink-jet codes an expiration date onto the film.
Supplied by Duralam (Appleton, WI), the film is a 3-mil adhesive lamination of 60-ga uncoated nylon and a linear low-density polyethylene sealant layer. The outside nylon layer is reverse-printed in eight colors, though details on the printing method were unavailable at press time.
According to Romance Foods, the material provides moisture barrier, product protection, heat stability, puncture resistance and toughness. The structure helps provide the thermally processed sauce a 120-day shelf life. Pizza Creations! is a line of pizza fixings, each of which is sold in a separate flexible plastic package. The line includes three varieties of 5 ¼-oz shredded cheeses, three versions of 7” mini crusts, a 1.7-oz pepperoni and two sauce offerings.
