Berry has achieved significant weight reduction for its 1 kg UniPack container supplied to leader to leading German dairy producer Milchwerke Schwaben, to help meet the customer’s sustainability objectives. And this enhancement has also led to smarter logistics and improved efficiency on the filling line.

Milchwerke Schwaben wanted to redesign the 1 kg UniPak container used for its Weideglück brand of yoghurt- and milk-based desserts, to reduce the container’s weight and its use of base materials.

“We wanted a weight reduction and we achieved almost 19% which we are very satisfied with,” told Jakob Ramm, managing director at Milchwerke Schwaben. “The 1kg container now weighs 35 g as opposed to 43 g before. But happily, we got even more than that from the redesign project with Berry because, thanks to alterations in the design, we can now load more containers onto each pallet.” 

He continued, "In addition, after modifying our filling line slightly to fit the redesigned container, we have fewer handling costs and our filling line simply runs much better now."

Berry achieves 19% weight reduction for its 1kg UniPack container supplied dairy producer Milchwerke Schwaben.

Instead of 540 kg on each pallet, Milchwerke Schwaben can now fit a total of 594 kg of containers on every pallet. This benefit is thanks to the redesigned container’s reduced headspace and improved indexation which keeps the positioning of pails in a stack. Equally important, all the changes made by Berry have been achieved without impacting on the overall effectiveness of the container.

“To achieve the lower weight, Berry made several small adjustments,” Ramm introduced. “They reduced the headspace, made the skirt shorter and the handles thinner, and changed the tamper evidence function. In this way, we were able to meet the demand from retailers and consumers to reduce the amount of packaging material without compromising the container’s great consumer appeal.”

Milchwerke Schwaben is a pioneer in the dairy market. Almost 30 years ago, the company was first to introduce the 1 kg container for yoghurt and milk-based desserts.

The 1 kg packaging was then – as it is now – the UniPak container from Berry. When first launched, the container weighed 50 g; a few years later this was reduced to 43 g, and now to just 35 g.

In addition, the redesigned container maintains its eye-catching In-Mold Labelling (IML) decoration to make consumers notice the product on supermarket shelves. The Weideglück brand won an award from the In-mold Labelling Association last year for the decoration on the yoghurt container, which features a smart label with an embedded code that the eye cannot detect.

This printed Digimarc code allows consumers to interact with the product and link to a website via a mobile app to check the origins of the product. It also enables retailers to reduce time at the checkout.