Seal It Right: Selecting the Best Cap and Spout for Your Flexible Packaging Application
A convenient, lighter-weight solution that uses less material and extends shelf life, flexible packaging is flexing its strengths in the marketplace today. This type of packaging, which you mostly recognize in formats like pouches, bags and more, is widely utilized across a variety of industries from food and beverage to personal and home care solutions and beyond.
Beyond the quality of your flexible film, caps and spouts are a critical factor in a product’s success. Finding the right solution for your application can maximize the safety, sustainability and production efficiency of the whole package to protect your brand and product’s reputation in the market and differentiate on-shelf.
Here’s a look at three considerations to make sure you select a cap and spout that’s just right for you and today’s consumers.
Driving Production Efficiency
Caps and spouts must be chosen intentionally to properly integrate with your complete package. To optimize manufacturing and minimize overall expenses, it’s crucial to consider how caps and spouts assimilate into your filling processes. For example, consider the different fill types that may be required for your product – fill-through or assembled – or even the filling processes, like retort, hot fill, HPP (high pressure pasteurization) or ambient.
But the most important specification to examine for caps and spouts? Compatibility with filling machines.
Existing filling equipment can sometimes limit your choices for caps and spouts, as fitments must be specified to fit specific filling machines. However, if your co-manufacturing partner or internal team is just establishing a new filling line, or integrating new equipment, you now have the opportunity to select a machine that aligns with your preferred cap and spout provider.
How Hoffer Plastics Can Help
With a comprehensive and continuously evolving line of flexible packaging caps and spouts, known as Trust-T-Lok™, we’re always ready to deliver the right solution for your needs, including:
- Minimizing your upfront investment – Collaborating with filling machine manufacturers – including Mespack, Effytec, IMA and more – to make sure your caps are compatible with industry-leading filling equipment. We also offer a drop-in option that can work with almost any machine on the market.
- Supporting your filling process – Offering proven solutions for nearly any new system – form-fill-seal, fill-seal; hot fill, ambient, retort, fill through, assembled, etc.
- Accelerating launch success – Customizing our proprietary Trust-T-Lok™ caps to meet your specific needs with a variety of designs, colors and sizes to quickly fulfill upon your needs.
Supporting Sustainability
For some applications, flexible packaging can achieve critical goals that make it a more attractive alternative to rigid options. For example, where product weight and transportation are a concern, flexible packaging is a lightweight and efficient solution. Your caps and spouts should similarly advance your sustainability – and business – goals.
The right fitments may be able to do their job with less plastic or incorporate recyclable or biodegradable alternatives to lessen your carbon footprint. Caps and spouts can also be made from post-production resins that help reduce plastic waste in landfills.
As a result, you can further reduce your environmental footprint and align with eco-conscious consumer preferences.
How Hoffer Plastics Can Help
We’ve worked hard to upgrade our spout and cap designs and production to:
- Eliminate unnecessary material, specifically in the evolution of our P-15 cap, which was redesigned to require 46% less plastic than its previous iteration.
- Incorporate mono-material solutions where feasible to make it easier to recycle – including our proprietary Lok™ family of patented closures for the growing grab-and-go market.
- Leverage unique resin blends that can lower heat seal initiation if needed with certain Mono PE solutions.
- Reduce our own carbon footprint with significant material, energy and water usage reductions throughout our entire manufacturing facility.
Maximizing Product Safety
From the store shelf to the home, flexible packaging helps protect foods, beverages, personal care products and pharmaceuticals. Caps and spouts play a key role in this mission. Your closures must provide a perfect seal, safeguard quality, and prevent choking and other safety hazards.
These are potentially life-and-death issues. To protect consumers and build trust and loyalty, you don’t just need standard features like tamper-evident seals. You also need a cap and spout manufacturer you can trust to uphold the most stringent product safety and quality standards during their own manufacturing process to protect your reputation and most importantly, end users.
How Hoffer Plastics Can Help
You’ll find an unwavering commitment to the highest standards of food safety and quality in all of our Trust-T-Lok™ products and every step of our production process.
- SQF Certified – We are certified by SQF, an independent verification that our products and processes meet stringent international standards for food safety. In addition to other certifications including IMS, IATF and MedAccred.
- CPSC choke-proof standards – Crucial for food applications to make sure children are safe around your caps.
- Tamper-evident closures – Providing a hermetic seal for security and consumer confidence through our Trust-T-Lok™ line.
Delivering a Satisfying Sense of Closure
When you incorporate the right spout or cap for your flexible packaging, you help maximize the advantages of sustainability, efficiency, safety and, ultimately, consumer satisfaction.
We hope these tips help you achieve that for your product. If you have any questions about the keys to success with closures, don’t hesitate to contact us! Looking for rigid packaging solutions? Learn more about our proprietary Drop-Lok™ closures here.