During the pandemic, the demand for food and pharmaceutical products grew exponentially, thus creating problems in the procurement of raw materials for the production of packaging in these sectors. To overcome the shortage of raw materials, through its know-how and the technological facilities of its plants, COIM rapidly developed new, more sustainable formulations capable of ensuring the same performance, despite using more readily available raw materials
C.O.I.M. S.p.A., an Italian multinational company producing specialty chemicals since 1962 and operating worldwide with nineteen manufacturing and trading companies,managed to transform the crisis caused by the pandemic into an opportunity to increase the sustainability of its portfolio of solutions for the production of food and pharma packaging. This led to the creation of a new modular solventless solution for these applications.
“During the pandemic, the demand for packaged food products increased considerably as a result of an emotional reaction to lockdown and the closure of restaurants. The numerous pictures of empty shelves in supermarkets remain imprinted in our memory. At the same time, an increase in demand for pharmaceutical products was also recorded. On the contrary, entire basic chemistry sectors were completely blocked due to the drop in demand that took place in numerous industrial sectors and to various factors related to logistics and transport, thus creating a shortage of raw materials for many applications”, states Sergio Doldi, COIM Technical Manager of Adhesives, Coatings and Inks for Flexible Packaging.
“This situation not only led to an increase in prices but also severely complicated the operations of the production chain of food and pharma packaging. In that period, COIM, who had to meet the growing demand for chemical products for packaging in any case, transformed the crisis into an opportunity to increase the sustainability and efficiency of its product portfolio.”
The chemical products involved in the production of food and pharma packaging that suffered from the crisis the most were the new generation products, which use selected raw materials to comply with the latest regulatory requirements and can only be obtained from a limited number of suppliers. Faced with the procurement difficulties, which necessarily had to be tackled to avoid blocking the production chain of food and pharmaceutical products, COIM launched an R&D project for the development of a new modular solventless adhesive system, which, despite the use of more readily available raw materials, satisfied the following requirements:
The result was a new modular solventless adhesive system based on a component obtained from a single-stage process, which significantly simplified the manufacturing process, to the benefit of more streamlined planning of the entire production and sales network. The performance of this system proved to be better from all points of view, including:
“This was all done within just a few months due to COIM's ability to carry out all the phases of development with its own technologies, using its own facilities and laboratories, without having to procure external services. In this way, we managed to give top priority to the project with a view to ensuring a continuous supply for this extremely strategic sector, which became even more important during the pandemic. Further evidence of COIM's holistic vision of sustainability: the environmental impact aspects are every bit as important as economic and social sustainability”, concludes Sergio Doldi.
C.O.I.M. S.p.a. press office: Origgi Consulting S.r.l.
Manager: Daniela Origgi
d.origgi@origgiconsulting.it – Mob. (+39) 347 1729113
COIM press office team:
pressoffice@origgiconsulting.it - Tel. (+39) 039 2307137
