Plastic Ingenuity, GSK Takes Home 2016 WorldStar Packaging Award
The World Packaging Organisation (WPO) has selected packaging and custom thermoforming leader Plastic Ingenuity (PI) as a 2016 WorldStar Packaging Award winner. This accolade recognizes PI’s long-term collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to develop the custom heat-sealed Flonase OTC Pack.
Every year, WPO judges evaluate businesses that have already won national awards so as to recognize the best of the best in packaging excellence and advancement. On behalf of WPO, the Hungarian Association of Packaging and Materials Handling will formally honor all 2016 WorldStar winners at an awards presentation ceremony and dinner in Budapest, Hungary on May 26, 2016.
“The World Packaging Organisation brings together the packaging industry’s most innovative designers,” said Plastic Ingenuity’s Marketing Director Rob Helmke. “We are honored to receive their recognition and to be able to share our custom design with the rest of the packaging community.”
The WorldStar accolades follow PI’s two recent 2015 AmeriStar Package Awards for Flonase and Sargento Balanced Breaks™. The nationally and internationally praised Flonase design involved hundreds of hours of research and trial testing in order to control a heat sealed bond along a contoured flange while maintaining mass production capabilities.
The Flonase package’s contoured edges presented difficulty for the location variation of the heat seal press’ rotary table; a discrepancy of just +/- 0.005” would alter the seal. PI accommodated for the variation by developing precise heat-seal tooling to be used with the PI thermoformed parts on GSK’s heat seal machinery.
The use of high speed equipment also presented challenges to the repeatability of the heat seal design: too much pressure would over-penetrate or puncture the package, while too little pressure would fail to correctly seal the package. PI built individual nest and heater adjustability and guidance into the system to combat this risk.
After the first heat sealing trial, PI identified three issues with the equipment. For successful packaging, it would need:
1.   A bigger heater to achieve commercial level production.
2.   More wattage without exceeding 500 degrees F (to prevent Teflon wear).
3.   Heavier and more accurate indexing to support tooling weight.
The award-winning Flonase OTC pack would not have been possible without PI’s pharmaceutical packaging expertise, and a collaborative relationship with GSK and GSK’s other suppliers.
To learn more about Plastic Ingenuity’s award-winning package innovations, we invite you to download our free eBook “The Secrets of Successful Packaging.”
