Film Adds Pop
To Caramel Corn Sales

Trail’s End Caramel Corn, a signature snack and popular fundraiser for the Boy Scouts of America, recently converted from decorative tins and rigid plastic pails to a quad-seal bag.

Besides an 80-85 percent reduction in disposable waste compared to rigid alternatives, the 3-ply film from which the bag is made provides excellent stiffness for machineability on Weaver’s form-fill-seal lines and helps the package stand prominently on a store or pantry shelf—all qualities that can easily be attributed to Danafilms’ 6334 linear low density polyethylene sealant film.

"With the Trail’s End 11 Ounce Classic Caramel Corn bag, the client needed a film that gave them good seals in the gussets and around the Inno-Lok zipper," says Steve Crimmin, sales manager at Danafilms. "In that case, the key facet for this film was clearly machineability."

As Crimmin explains, the process of matching a film to suit a specific purpose, like the ability to run on Weaver Popcorn’s high-speed vertical form-fill-seal lines, is a lot like a doctor investigating a patient’s symptoms to develop a diagnosis.
"What kind of a product is going to be packaged? Is it going to have sharp edges which could puncture the package?" says Crimmin. "With that, you determine whether you need sealing and/or strength properties, then you finally ask yourself, ‘Which film would fit this?’"

That film proved to be Danafilms’ 6334, an existing film with a solid track record for excellent sealability and machineability. Once laminated to a polyester/metalized film extruded from a proprietary blend, the 3-ply film emerged as a complete solution, providing Weaver with the desired barrier, structural integrity, and graphics qualities it was seeking in a resealable stand-up popcorn bag.

"Converting to a flexible package really helped our client realize a lot of benefits over the historical tins and plastic pails from which they converted," notes Crimmin. He explains that the graphics, for one, improved considerably over the shrink-wrapped plastic pail of the past. Further, the stiffness of Danafilms’ 6334 film provides a good “billboard” that helps promote the product inside and the Boy Scouts’ cause on all four panels of the quad-seal bag. "And, with the Boy Scouts being an organization you closely associate with the environment, they were able to make an environmental impact by reducing the amount of packaging, shipping more product weight than packaging weight, and driving down the potential for landfill waste."

That environmental impact hasn’t gone unnoticed in the flexible packaging landscape. Linthicum, Maryland-based Flexible Packaging Association (FPA) recognized the popcorn packaging and its manufacturers, Kansas City, Kansas-based Plastic Packaging Technologies and Danafilms, with a Silver Award for Environmental & Sustainability Achievement in its 2011 Flexible Packaging Achievement Awards program. According to FPA, the Trail’s End Popcorn package serves as a compelling case study for converting from rigid to flexible packaging based on the package’s ability to reduce disposable waste from 6.0 ounces to 0.9 ounces compared to the metal tin configuration.

Visit the Danafilms Website.
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