Case study Tray sealing Fresh produce, Belgium
Belgian tomato specialist Den Berk Délice has upgraded to a Packaging Automation REV6 top sealer, installed by PA's Benelux partner Het Packhuys — the latest step in a four-year top-sealing journey that now spans six PA machines across the group's sites.
A grower packing to retail standards
Den Berk Délice is one of Belgium's best-known tomato producers, packing cherry tomatoes and a wider range of snack vegetables from its site at Hoogstraten. Around four years ago the business found itself facing a retail market that was rethinking packaging faster than at any point in the previous decade: buyers were moving away from rigid lids and overwrap towards lighter mono-material packs with a smaller environmental footprint, and Den Berk Délice had no intention of being the one catching up.
Top sealing, film sealed directly onto the tray rim, answered that brief. It cuts pack weight and pack height while keeping product visibility, tamper evidence and containment intact all the way through to the shelf.
Den Berk Délice reviewed what was available on the market before selecting Het Packhuys, PA's long-standing partner in the Benelux, on the basis of which solution genuinely suited the way the site worked. The first top sealer went in shortly afterwards. Today the group runs six top-sealing machines across its sites, including one in Morocco.
Why the REV range was the natural next step
Den Berk Délice had been running PA Revolution machines for several years. When the REV series launched, it opened up a clear upgrade path for a customer who already knew the platform.
The REV range was developed around what operators actually feel shift to shift — speed, ease of use, the software, and how fast you can get tooling changed over. Those are the gains that turn up in the output figures.
The REV6 sits at the high-output end of the single-lane range, combining a larger sealing bed with PA's intelligent syncroflexPRO control. The machine monitors the rate at which trays are being presented and adjusts its own speed to suit, so the operator is no longer tuning settings to chase throughput. Like every machine in the range, it is fully electric and runs without compressed air.
Crucially for an upgrade project, the REV6 takes the same films as the previous generation. That made dropping it into the existing line considerably simpler than a machine change usually is — a step up in performance without a wholesale change of packaging materials at the same time.
In production since April
The REV6 has been running as part of the packing operation since April, installed into an existing line rather than as part of a new build. The team took to it quickly: it is faster, simpler to run, and smoother in operation than the machine it replaced.
That consistency counts for more in fresh produce than in almost any other category. Tomatoes vary in size, shape, temperature and surface moisture; trays can distort during de-nesting and filling; and a stray leaf or a piece of fruit on the flange is enough to compromise a seal. A machine that holds its settings and adapts to what is actually arriving on the infeed is what keeps a shift running.
The wider shift to top sealing
The move to top seal has been building for well over a decade and is still accelerating, far beyond tomatoes, into strawberries, cherries, soft fruit, mushrooms and much else besides.
Alongside it, demand is shifting from standalone machines to complete lines. Het Packhuys now builds full lines around the top sealer with its partner J-TS, covering case packing, palletising, de-nesting, conveying, labelling, barcode detection, checkweighing and metal detection. Customers increasingly want one partner accountable for the whole process rather than five suppliers pointing at each other when something stops — which is precisely what PA's partner network is built to deliver.
Service is the other half of the machine
In fresh produce, downtime is not an inconvenience, it is a missed delivery. Produce doesn't wait for an engineer, and Den Berk Délice rates responsive service and short lines of communication as highly as the technology itself.
If we can fix it down the line, we do. If we can't, someone travels. What we don't do is leave a customer waiting to find out which it'll be.
For Den Berk Délice, that reliability is a large part of why the relationship has continued to grow.
