Greater freshness and longer shelf life, savings in energy costs and space requirements, as well as increased production capacity. These are the features of the new Cooling@Packing System from MULTIVAC. An innovation for cooling bakery products in a packaging machine, which has now been given the German Packaging Award. The solution was also honored with a Gold Award, which is presented for outstanding innovations from among all the Packaging Award winners. On the Tuesday of FACHPACK the German Packaging Institute (Deutsche Verpackungsinstitut e. V.) selected the 41 winners of the German Packaging Awards in ten different categories. The award is the biggest prize in Europe for innovation in the packaging sector.

“It is a great honor for us to receive this award for our product innovation Cooling@Packing. A big thank you goes to the entire team for the great cooperation,” said Dr Tobias Richter, group president (CSO) of the MULTIVAC Group. “The solution also reduces energy costs and space requirements – and the recognition by the jury is confirmation of our ongoing commitment to develop groundbreaking new technology, which helps our customers to produce more efficiently and sustainably.“

The MULTIVAC Cooling@Packing System is a vacuum application for cooling bakery products, which integrates the cooling process into the thermoforming packaging machine. This enables the bakery products to be packed immediately after baking, so that a longer product shelf life and greater freshness can be achieved.

Bakery products are traditionally cooled by means of cooling spirals at ambient temperature, or alternatively by passing through cooling tunnels. Both procedures require a lot of space in the production area, as well as a high level of investment. There is also the risk of product contamination during slow cooling processes.

The MULTIVAC Cooling@Packing System enables bakery products (e.g. baguettes, breads or biscuits) to be loaded directly from the oven, using loading robots to hygienically place the products into the open packs at the loading station of the thermoforming packaging machine. The bakery products are cooled down within a few seconds from 95°C to approx. 30°C in the packaging machine, using an evacuation process in the chambers. The cooling effect is produced by the vaporization energy, which is released by the evaporation of the bakery product's own moisture during the evacuation process.

The MULTIVAC Cooling@Packing System not only offers space savings in production areas, but also savings in energy consumption for product cooling. The production capacity can also be increased thanks to shorter baking times, without the product quality suffering. The new solution can be integrated into MULTIVAC thermoforming packaging machines in the high-output range.