The Home Stretch

In the world of packaging, there are many steps before a manufactured good arrives safely at its destination. One of the most vital steps is ensuring it survives the transportation process, which can include trips on planes, trains, cargo ships, trucks and, sometimes, all of the above. Phoenix Wrappers of Laval, Que., understands this reality better than most.

A leader in stretch-wrap machine manufacturing, Phoenix Wrappers, a Pacteon Company, specializes in a full range of stretch-wrap equipment from semi-automatic machines to high-speed, fully automatic custom-built material-handling systems.

With its 80 employees, the company handles everything from manufacturing and assembly to sales support, design and engineering from its 50,000-square-foot facility in Laval.

Currently celebrating 30 years in the packaging industry, the company serves a wide variety of industries: from brick and block to agricultural, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, bagging, distribution centres, and more.

Originally named Phoenix Innotech, the company was started up in 1994 by Manfred Fourestier, who had previously been the general manager of other respected wrapping equipment manufacturers.

The company attempted to aggressively expand in the early 2000s, but after finding itself under a great deal of financial pressure in 2001, Fourestier reached out for a partner in the business and found Jacek Mucha, founder and owner of Orion Packaging.

After selling Orion Packaging to a multinational company, Mucha and Fourestier teamed up with another the senior engineer at Phoenix to create a strong manufacturing base for the company.

In 2006, Can-Am Packaging Systems (CAPS) partnered with Phoenix Innotech as the master distributor worldwide for all sales. In 2016, CAPS and private equity investment firm Vopne acquired the manufacturing side of the brand from Mucha and combined CAPS with Phoenix Wrappers.

The company then embarked on a journey to significantly grow its market share and hired Luc Bergeron as its general manager to lead the expansion.

“When I joined, it was more of an entrepreneurial company,” Bergeron recalls. “We rebuilt from the ground-up all the business processes, good practices, and rebuilt the team in all functions from engineering, production, finance, human resources, logistics, aftermarket and supply chain.

“A lot of things happened between 2016 and 2021 to bring the company to that point,”he says, “where it’s exponentially growing and improving.”

In 2021, the company was purchased by the Pacteon Group, an integrated end-of-the-line packaging provider comprised of four companies: Phoenix Wrappers; Descon Conveyor Systems of Newmarket, Ont.; Schneider Packaging Equipment Company of Brewerton, N.Y.; and ESS Technologies of Blacksburg, Va.

While the four companies work together to offer complete packaging solutions, the Pacteon Group has each company’s operations managed independently, letting the product experts at each location leverage their unique knowledge of their customers’ needs.

“It’s a balance between synergies and making sure that each business keeps to their own specific expertise,” Bergeron says.

Bergeron says the acquisition created many opportunities for growth in the packaging sector for Phoenix Wrappers.

“There are a lot of synergies we are creating from engineering, production and supply chain, so there are a lot of savings and a lot of sharing of good practices,” Bergeron says.

“We’re working together to offer a completely integrated solutions to our customers now: not just being a standalone supplier, but also being part of end-of-the-line packaging solutions.”

Bergeron adds that being part of Pacteon has also allowed Phoenix Wrappers to leverage some very useful modern technology tools, such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems.

“These are all tools to better manage customer service,” Bergeron points out.

As Bergeron acknowledges, one of the biggest advantages of joining a larger company is the ready access to additional service technicians, who are always in high demand.

“We have close to 50 technicians now, so we have people available to better respond to customer needs and customer support,” Bergeron says.

“We are cross-training them so they can support each other [across different product lines],” he adds. “It’s a great advantage.”

With a deeper pool of product designers and engineers to draw from, Phoenix Wrappers is improving its capabilities to work with integrators to provide more flexible solutions than ever before.

“We are also growing the overall stretch-wrapping knowledge and expertise within the group,” Bergeron adds.

As he relates, Phoenix Wrappers recently invested in new steel cutting tools for in-house fabrication and racking to grow its capacity and to effectively support increasing demand for its products.

While the company is manufacturing automated equipment, many of the facility’s processes are still performed the old-fashioned way.

“We’re not deeply automated in terms of equipment to build the machines,” Bergeron says. “There are a lot of manual and semi-manual processes to make those assemblies.

“The fundamentals of wrappers are standardized,” he says, “but it’s much more customized for fully-automatic applications.”

One of the strengths of Phoenix is we provide reliable custom solutions that are responsive to customer needs.”

Keeping the operation as flexible as possible is key for Phoenix Wrappers, which prides itself on offering customized solutions in response to any customer environment.

“We’re dealing with all sorts of difficult environments: cold, wash-down, hot, harsh environments… everything you can imagine that can affect how to properly wrap products on a pallet,” he explains. “Fortunately, we are very strong at responding to those different customer needs.”

As Bergeron relates, today’s customers are looking for reliable and cost-effective solutions when it comes to the stretch-wrapping equipment days, with price sensitivity being a very commonplace purchasing factor.

The company’s full range of stretch-wrap equipment offer users a variety of unique and special features, including:

• Film carriage cut and wipe, a low-maintenance mechanism with a Safe impulse cut wire and an over-wrapping film clamp.
• Breathe-easy film slitters, which uses standard stretch film rolls to and slices the film into bands for stronger holding power and aeration on the finished load.
• Dual film carriage systems to ensure optimal holding power, puncture resistance, and quick wrapping for higher production environments.

Some of Phoenix Wrappers automated features and HMI (human-machine interface) functions being incorporated into their machines include handy options, such as no load contact film tail treatment on their rotary-ring automatic pallet wrappers (RINGs) with PackML (Packaging Machine Language) program standardization.

The company’s PRRA rotary ring stretch wrappers feature a unique pallet wrapping ring concept, which incorporates three preset cycles to save on film by placing it as needed. The ability to heat seal film tails is integrated on the standard machine, while its ability to start and finish wrapping anywhere on the load opens the possibility to double- or triple-stack loads and wrap them individually. It also has a dual head film carriage option for longer intervals between film roll changes.

When operating the stretch-wrapping equipment, it’s not unusual for a lot of stretch-wrap film to go to waste. To address the issue, Phoenix Wrappers’ engineers are currently investigating the use of paper wrap on existing stretch-wrapping machines as a more sustainable solution.

In addition, the demand for thinner stretch wrap made from increasing levels of post-recycled consumer resin (PCR) is also growing in popularity.

“High-performance films are popular, but they are very thin,” says Bergeron.

“Our machines are suited for these films with effective pre-stretch capacity and upgrades for higher levels of stretch.

“We can achieve longer intervals between roll changes with these thinner, higher-performing films,” he explains, “as they are more resilient and better-performing than the traditional cast films.”

Looking to the future, Bergeron says Phoenix Wrappers plans to continue taking advantage of synergies within the Pacteon Group to grow its market share.

“I think our ambitions are to grow and continue adding a bigger footprint in the North American market, but also on the southern border as well, in places like Mexico,” he concludes.

“I think that we have the product lines, we have the team, and we have the organization to have a much better footprint in the industry.”