Nichrome’s multi-head CWGs for other granular products

Pune-based Nichrome India was the first indigenous company to manufacture form fill and seal machines for milk packed in flexible pouches. Established in 1948, the company diversified to packaging equipment in 1977. Nichrome has continuously pioneered equipment along with consumer product leaders such as Tata Tea for its linear electronic weigh filler for packaging tea bags and tea in pouches.

For the last 40 years, Nichrome has been designing and manufacturing vertical and horizontal form fill machines, multilane machines, and small sachet machines. Now, the company has moved into integrated packaging solutions, and it is offering every solution from product handling to warehousing under one roof.

At the PackEx India exhibition, Nichrome showed a flexiwrap machine, a tray sealing machine, and its 3-head Cut Gate Weigher machine for its customers in the grain market, as it was mainly promoting its filling machine that is developed for granular products. While speaking with Mrunal Joshi, vice-chairperson and chief executive officer at Nichrome, we learned about the functioning of the flexiwrap machine, which is used for secondary packaging. 

Talking about the flexiwrap machine and its working, Joshi said, “The Flexiwrap machine is developed for secondary packaging, and it is meant to be used for packing 50 gram and 100 gram pouches of detergents and also spices. As you feed the pouch in this machine, either it can automatically come out of the form fill machine, or you can fold the chain of pouches and keep them on it, then it gets overwrapped.”

“Secondly, we have tabletop machines for startups and small companies that want to grow with less investment, so we have introduced modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) for food packaging. To increase the shelf life of the food products or reduce the level of oxygen in the packed food, MAP technology is used in which food is packed under a controlled atmosphere with a combination of gases like nitrogen and carbon dioxide.”

Joshi concluded by telling us about Nichrome’s latest innovations and the kind of customers it was looking for in the exhibition, “Today, we have a 3-head Cut Gate Weigher (CGW) which is a filling machine, branded as Intel Weigh and it is used for granular products such as grains, seeds, and rice. It is a solid technology with high accuracy and high speed, and it goes on the top of a form fill seal machine to fill the packets. We are currently working on developing our new 6-head CGW machine, which will be introduced very soon. However, it is our first exhibition after Covid-19 so, we are mainly looking for the customers who need machines for the packaging of granular products.”

The Covid-19 pandemic led to the country-wide lockdown on 25 March 2020. It will be two years tomorrow as I write this. What have we learned in this time? Maybe the meaning of resilience since small companies like us have had to rely on our resources and the forbearance of our employees as we have struggled to produce our trade platforms.

The print and packaging industries have been fortunate, although the commercial printing industry is still to recover. We have learned more about the digital transformation that affects commercial printing and packaging. Ultimately digital will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future.

Web analytics show that we now have readership in North America and Europe amongst the 90 countries where our five platforms reach. Our traffic which more than doubled in 2020, has at times gone up by another 50% in 2021. And advertising which had fallen to pieces in 2020 and 2021, has started its return since January 2022.

As the economy approaches real growth with unevenness and shortages a given, we are looking forward to the PrintPack India exhibition in Greater Noida. We are again appointed to produce the Show Daily on all five days of the show from 26 to 30 May 2022.

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