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Don't let the rural setting and small population of Berwick, Pa., fool you. Nestled in this town of 20,000 people is the world's largest snack-food plant: a 750,000-square-foot facility, operated by Wise Foods Inc., that turns out 625 million bags of snacks every year.
Among the snacks manufactured at the Berwick plant are potato chips, which it produces at a rate of one million pounds per week. Maintaining that kind of product flow requires a streamlined process that begins when the potatoes arrive at the plant by tractor-trailer, and ends only after they have been peeled, sliced, fried, flavored and, finally, packaged.
A couple of years ago, however, production slowed down--causing considerable grief for Wise employees. The problem: the packaging material was performing erratically on the line's forming tube. According to Jim Williams, Wise technical manager, friction between the packaging film and the forming tube was causing the film to stick and bunch up.
Once the problem was identified, a team made up of representatives from Mobil Chemical Company's chemical films division, Wise and Bryce LLC--Wise's converter--was assembled. Their task was to develop a new metallized oriented polypropylene (OPP) flexible packaging film to solve the problem.
Right from the start, says Bryce technical manager Mike Williams, the year-long project was a truly cooperative effort.
"We brought the group together and first got...