Have you ever purchased a 24-pack of bottled water or visited your local wholesale retailer or club store  to purchase a multi-pack bundle of flour? Chances are these products were packaged together using a bundling machine. Bundling is an ideal solution for packaging multiple products together while reducing the amount of corrugate needed for shipping and storing products. To bundle products, polyethylene film is typically used to enclose the product in sleeve of film. The bundled product is then shrunk using a bundling tunnel, resulting in a wrapped package with an open “bulls-eye” enclosure on both sides. This is typically seen on multi-pack beverage products such as water bottles, trayed products, multi-pack consumer goods, cases that need extra security, and other larger products bundled in a group.

Bundlers

Automatic bundlers are commonly used to combine multiple products into one package. The product can either be placed in a corrugated tray or placed in a group and then wrapped with film. Boxes can also be put through a bundler to add an extra level of security to the products. Once placed on the infeed conveyor, the products are fed through the machine into a sheet of film, and then past the seal head section of the bundler.

Once the product passes the seal head, heated seal bars come together to fuse the upper and lower sections of film, creating an open-ended sleeve around the product. To seal the thick film used in bundling applications, bundlers are equipped with a hot knife seal system to create a clean, positive, and even seal.

Bundlers are offered in multiple seal bar widths to accommodate various sizes of products. Eastey offers a wide selection of automatic bundlers available in four different sizes – 25’’(EB25A), 35’’(EB35A), 50’’(EB50A), and 70’’(EB70A).

Bundling Tunnels

After the package has been bundled, it moves down the conveyor to a bundling tunnel. Bundling tunnels are designed to shrink the thick polyethylene film used in bundling applications. The bundling tunnel shrinks the film tightly around the product creating a sealed and secure finish. To ensure an evenly shrunk bundle, Eastey’s bundling tunnels utilize four directional airflows to provide a positive and uniform finish to the package.

Bundling is a great way to combine a group of products to make a single package. To learn more about Eastey’s bundling solutions, visit the bundler section on Eastey.com or give us a call to speak to one of our knowledgeable packaging engineers!