Most small to midsized wineries do their own packaging. They erect and glue wine box bottoms, insert the filled bottles of wine and glue the tops of these boxes.
The most time consuming portion of the packaging process is the erecting of the wine box and the sealing of the box bottom. When gluing the bottom both liquid adhesives and hot melt adhesives are used. Typically the box is opened, the minor flaps folded in, the adhesive applied, the major flaps folded over the minor flaps and the box flipped over and compressed from the inside.
This process is very time consuming and tedious especially when using white or water based glue. Because this is so labor intensive it is not considered ergonomically correct package assembly. Fortunately, this problem can be easily addressed.
We recommend wineries purchase or build the correct box erector. This consists in its most basic form of a high volume hot melt system, box mandrel and tool balancer to hold the hot melt handgun. With a properly sized mandrel and box stop on the mandrel post, the box can be squared and the flaps glued in two quick steps. Slide the box over the box mandrel, fold the flaps, apply the hot melt, compress the flaps, pull the box off the mandrel and repeat. The hot melt gun should be properly “tool balanced” for easy use.
This system and will allow operators to easily make quality packaging at a much higher rate with less fatigue. The typical hot melt cost per box bottom is one cent.
Gluing the top of the case with hot melt is much easier and it requires half the adhesive quantity.