Striking packaging for 'home-made' sauce

MEGA Fleisch has traded for more than 80 years and is one of Germany’s largest butcher cooperatives. With an extensive product range of ready meals and ‘home-made’ delicacies for the retail sector, it also has an assortment of more than 50,000 non-food articles and items for the food industry.

One of its latest delicacies is a beef sauce and beef stock, which is sold in German supermarket EDEKA under its private label called ‘Our House Brand’. 

Special attention has been paid to the packaging design, which looks like an exclusive kilner-like jar and highlights the products on the supermarket shelves.

“Our carefully prepared new product line of sauce and stock called for a spectacular packaging format and design, communicating the exquisite quality. And of course we wanted the product to stand out from the other offerings on the shelves,” said Helmut Schulz, Masterchef and Operations Manager of MEGA Fleisch.

“The Schur Star bag range comprises many attractive options, but we decided to favour the Schur Star Jar Bag. It has a striking look, and the product presentation conveys exactly what we intended — a carefully prepared, home-made delicacy.”

From manual filling to an automated packing process

For some time, MEGA Fleisch has used the advantages of the Schur Star Concept. With a switch from time-consuming and labour-intensive manual filling to a fully automated packing system, the company has managed to simplify its packing process considerably. Even with a manning reduction, the company was able to optimise its packing capacity and also achieve logistical advantages. Subsequently, its line of ready meals for the catering sector is hot filled into Doy-shaped bags, pasteurised and labelled — with only two operators at the packaging machine.

­The Schur Star Concept is suitable for a comprehensive product range. The packaging machine is engineered for manual, semiautomatic and fully automatic filling with easy changeover. This allows the producer to pack practically any product — whether liquids, combination dishes with several elements or products that are difficult to handle. Other options are integration with processing equipment applying, eg, modified atmosphere or gas flush. And this versatility allowed MEGA Fleisch to pack additional products of its comprehensive product range on the Schur Star Packaging Machine.

The flexibility and the efficiency of the Schur Star Concept convinced MEGA Fleisch to make full use of all the available options and transfer the packing of the new retail sauce products to the machine.

“In the shops, the products have done extremely well — and we are in the process of preparing line extensions,” Schulz concluded.