ProAmpac unveils innovation center
ProAmpac, a global provider of flexible packaging solutions, including for retailer owned brand clients, opened the doors to a brand-new innovation center in Rochester, N.Y.
The 35,000-square-foot ProAmpac Collaboration & Innovation Center will be a home for product development, rapid sample prototyping and the evaluation of new packaging, as well as a place for customer and employee training, said Greg Tucker, founder and CEO of the Cincinnati-based company.
ProAmpac was recently featured in this Store Brands packaging report, discussing sustainable packaging and frozen food packaging trends. The company’s innovation center will be used to further explore packaging challenges in three designated labs.
The first is its Design and Sample Lab, where ProAmpac can collaborate with customers to ideate around packaging concepts and work with printed prototype samples. This particular lab was originally in a facility in Ohio but moving to this innovation hub.
The center will also have a Packaging Lab for product developers to test advanced materials around a package’s performance and sustainability measures. The lab allows for trials and testing, shelf-life studies, stability testing, pouching studies, and more. Lastly, the center will have a designated Analytical and Physical Packaging Lab, a resource for physical and analytical testing of packages. All of the company’s facilities had been doing this work but the innovation center will act as a centralized hub for testing. The lab holds environmental chambers for hard-to-hold testing, as well as new upgraded analytical testing capabilities including SEM, FTIR, and DCS for film analyzation.
ProAmpac’s innovation center sits near an existing production facility in the town of Ogden near Rochester, one of the company’s 50 global manufacturing facilities.
“Our CIC is a one-stop center providing our customers with a resource that helps them address their packaging product development needs including product design, testing, graphic design and filling. I am confident this facility will help greatly reduce the time required to go from concept to commercialization,” said Adam Grose, chief commercial officer.
The innovation center is also the home for LEAD ProAmpac Academy, where ProAmpac offers customers and employees twice-a-year training in extrusion, lamination, printing, and other flexible-packaging technologies, especially sustainability.
“Virtually every consumer products brand owner has made sustainability a top priority. Through ProActive Sustainability, we have become the go-to source for sustainable packaging solutions,” Grose said.