Application Description

Curwood, Inc., the country's premier converter for the meat processing industry, is helping Farmland Foods "bring home the bacon" with films made of DuPont™ Surlyn® resin.

Farmland Foods, based in Kansas City, MO, runs Curwood Curlon® 1800 bacon films, which contain DuPont™ Surlyn® 1601 for their retail bacon line.

John Hackinson, marketing manager, of Curwood, Inc., states, "Bacon is a product that has many packaging challenges. Typically, the seal areas are very narrow on high-speed bacon packaging equipment. Bacon has a high fat content, and the fat contributes to a high degree of contamination in the seal area.

"Packaging engineers at Curwood have incorporated DuPont™ Surlyn® because of its excellence at sealing through contamination and its wrinkle caulking ability. The company's expertise has allowed Curwood to become the largest supplier of bacon film in North America.

Farmland has found that, in addition to secure sealing through greasy fats, DuPont™ Surlyn® offers good hot tack and faster machine speeds, good puncture resistance and excellent clarity and sheen. Additionally, DuPont Surlyn® when coextruded into Curwood's proprietary film structures, resulted in a reduction in pinhole leakers.

"In order for Curwood to maintain our leadership position in the bacon industry, we must offer the best and lowest-end cost options to our customers," added Hackinson. Besides offering cutting edge films, Curwood also offers a total system approach for bacon with the Flex Vac® 6-18 high-speed bacon packaging equipment.

"DuPont Surlyn® is seen as playing a larger role in maintaining Curwood's leadership position," Hackinson says. "In 1999, Curwood will be introducing the new Flex Vac® 2000 High Speed machine, which will run up to 100 packages a minute. This is twice the line speeds of traditional bacon equipment. The new Flex Vac® 2000 requires a film that will demonstrate excellent hot tack to run at these demanding higher speeds. To date, DuPont™ Surlyn® is the only resin which has allowed us to maintain excellent package integrity at these higher speeds. With DuPont™ Surlyn® resins, we can not only offer our customers the best package, but we can develop systems around the film to improve our customers' overall cost and performance."

Curwood, Inc. based out of Oshkosh, WI, is a division of the Bemis Company, a leading manufacturer of flexible packaging films for the food and medical industries.

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