Leading sustainable packaging manufacturer Coveris, has today announced a transformational investment project at its St Neots packaging facility in Cambridgeshire, enabling the site to increase capacity of its recyclable food-to-go packaging products.
With the UK food-to-go market expected to reach £25bn by 2027, Coveris is set to support growing market demands through a transformational investment project at its dedicated Cambridgeshire based packaging hub.
As a leading manufacturer of award-winning food-to-go products, new plans to increase capacity and triple its operational footprint through a £5m investment into print, conversion and warehouse expansion, will see St Neot’s dual-facility become the largest fibre-based food-to-go manufacturing operation in Europe.
As Coveris’ Paper business unit’s biggest single investment to date, the upgraded site will be transformed into a factory of the future, purpose built around high-speed workflow and waste reduction, in line with the Group’s vision for No Waste.
Moving from a 1,000SQM to 3,158SQM production space through expansion into existing site areas, the new facility boasts robotics, lean design, smarter workflow, raw material optimisation, and a new state-of-the-art flexo press as part of the plans. With built-in capacity for further machine installations, the site will also be futureproofed for continued growth in the sector.
Work is set to commence this month, with the full project expected to complete Q1 2025. As a phased installation in new areas of the site, additional manufacturing is also supported by Coveris’ adjacent Wisbech and St Neots Howard Road facilities.
Delivering major increases in capacity, Coveris’ new factory concept is pivotal in driving the business’ sustainable vision of No Waste across its three pillars of operations, product, and packaging waste reduction. Responsible for the manufacture of around 700 million recyclable, Freshlife® engineered food-to-go packs a year, the new investment will deliver reduced waste set-up and running, with 100% automated inspection. New state-of-the-art air system installations will also deliver cleaner, reduced energy, significantly reducing electricity consumption.
With major investments having been made into plastic and paper recycling under the business’ ReCover operations, new systems at the St Neots site will enable better waste segregation to drive this, enabling the recovery of around 25% of waste as virgin board for fully circular reuse back into cartonboard products.
Commenting on the plans, Jo Ormrod, President for Coveris’ Paper Business Unit said “we’re really excited to unveil our expansion plans for the St Neots site and demonstrate our ongoing commitment to our customers as a leader in food-to-go. Having been purpose-built to not only increase capacity and availability of our award-winning products, we will now also be able to offer these with a reduced environmental footprint for both Coveris and our customers.”