It catches your eye on the shelves, tempts you to try something new or has you taking to social media when they change it.
Food-safe packaging is all around us – but how much time in a day do you spend thinking about it?
Digimock is a leading food-safe packaging company based in Warburton in Trafford, Greater Manchester. Founder Michael Davison is a veteran in the flexible packaging industry and has gained extensive experience working across manufacturing sites both in the UK and Europe.
Offering complete end-to-end solutions to clients, Digimock provides services ranging from packaging design, mock-up and prototype packaging right through to full-production reel-fed films and pre-made pack formats. Davison has had support from the GC Business Growth Hub’s manufacturing team.
Pandemic
Everything was going well until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The company faced a significant setback as sales of their mockup packaging service dropped significantly for two years: with all trade shows cancelled, the company’s clients had no means to showcase their packaged goods to buyers, leading to a sharp decline in demand for this part of their packaging service.
It was a tough time for Digimock – and Martin Hyman, one of the business advisors in the manufacturing team of GC Business Growth Hub was on hand to help.
With growing customer demand for Digimock to help them fill packages with their products, Davison started to consider venturing into the co-packing business – new territory for him – with guidance from Hyman.
With an approved clean room packing facility and investment into a range of filling and sealing equipment, Digimock launched a co-packing service known as ‘Packfill’, offering customers co-packing services on short lead times with no minimum order quantities. The company can pack dry and ambient products into various pre-made packaging formats. Typically, powders such as supplements, spice blends and ingredients mixes, confectionery items, tea and coffee, and even tablets.
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With the help of the manufacturing team of GC Business Growth Hub, Digimock obtained the necessary qualifications in handling food products and have attained the membership of SALSA (Safe and Local Supplier Approval) and are working towards the latest SALSA Approval Standard. The ability to offer in-house co-packing services and to design and sell the packaging material itself is a unique selling point that differentiates the company from many Digital print packaging companies.
Davison is looking forward to the future of ‘Packfill’ becoming one of the most profitable arms of the company through continued investment and focus on efficiencies.
Robotics
Hyman also introduced him to Tabs Khojani from The North of England Robotics Innovation Centre (NERIC), initially with a view to begin discussing with NERIC the potential for a cobot/robot for Packfill’s production line. After reviewing the company’s manufacturing operations with NERIC, the company adopted a solution to semi-automate the date coding of packed products. The previous process required each pack to be manually labelled with the dates, which was labour-intensive and prone to errors. Adopting the new process of semi-automating the date coding, direct to packaging, helped increase date coding capacity from 2,000 packs per day to 1,800 packs per hour, making the company more competitive in the market and adding capacity to enable growth, as well as reduces costs.
With all the upgrades in efficiency and marketing enhancement, Davison is looking forward to this year’s business being the best year since the pandemic.
“I think the service provided by the manufacturing team of GC Business Growth Hub is excellent, and the people on the team are fantastic,” he said. “When you’re running a business yourself, you don’t have a lot of time – but I know that if I reached out to Martin or somebody else in the manufacturing team, they will come back to me with suggestions on any opportunity to provide assistance.”
Hyman added: “As a manufacturing advisor, it’s always great to be able to help a manufacturing business in Greater Manchester to grow. It was a real privilege to have the opportunity to work with Mike as he was receptive to ideas which can help his manufacturing businesses grow.”
To find out more about GC Business Growth Hub’s impact on Manufacturing in Greater Manchester, please visit – Our Impact | GC Business Growth Hub
GC Business Growth Hub was part financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) 2014-2021, as part of a portfolio of ERDF-funded programmes designed to help ambitious SME businesses achieve growth and increase employment in Greater Manchester. Working in partnership with Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), formerly the Department for Communities and Local Government and Greater Manchester Local Enterprise Partnership.
How GC Business Growth Hub helped new businesses in Greater Manchester