The tallest, 10- and 12-count multipacks, take advantage of an overhead squaring lug feature on the cartoner, which is helpful due to the cartons’ heights.
Predictably, packaging came under scrutiny during this brand revolution. At that point, multipacks for just about every brand and variety of canned seafood had long used robust, printed shrink bundling film, capable of tightly containing heavy cans of seafood in the formats we still see on retail shelves, like a 4x2 8-pack of 5-oz cans. Bumble Bee was no exception in using this pack style, since shrink bundling was (and continues to be) a capable method of multipack delivery that withstands the supply chain well. Bumble Bee’s most common formats were 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, and 12-pack cans, either 5- or 7-oz, interchangeably called shrink bundles or cluster packs.
Specific to the Bumble Bee facility in Santa Fe Springs, Calif., shrink film was applied to build shrink bundle packs by a 25-year-old shrink overwrap machine that was on its last legs. The company couldn’t secure good support for such an old model, and it was frequently causing downtime on the line.
