PETpla.net Insider 10 / 2019

BOTTLE MAKING 30 PET planet Insider Vol. 20 No. 10/19 www.petpla.net The journey of the Sunpet brand From Thailand to India by Kay Barton TPAC (Thai Plaspac) Packaging established a major manufacturing bridgehead in India in 2018, when it acquired six sites of Sunrise Containers; they are now operating under the Sunpet brand. The Thai company, whose history stretches back to 36 years, has been the principal shareholder of its local representative in India since 1989. Sunrise Containers Ltd merged with TPAC in 2018, was rechristened TPAC Packaging India Pvt Ltd, and Sunpet is now their flagship brand. We spoke to Mr Shrinath Kasi, CEO, and Mr V. Subramanian, Vice President, Marketing, and visited two plants, at Silvassa and Umbergaon, with Mr Chitaran- jan Swain, Assistant Vice President Operation. Tour Sponsors: March 2019 We met: Mr Shrinath Kasi, CEO of TPAC Packaging India Pvt. Ltd. Mr V. Subramanian, Vice President Marketing Mr Chitaranjan Swain, Assistant Vice President Operation TPAC was founded in Thailand in 1983, where it is listed on the stock exchange. Its current headquarters are in the metropolis of Bangkok. Having enjoyed continuous growth and invested in a steady increase in capacity since its foundation, the converter has succeeded in becoming a key market leader. TPAC now has 10 production locations, six in India and branded as Sunpet, and four in Thailand. The Indian plants are scat- tered across the west and north of the country. The Silvassa plant is in the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, about 200 km North of Mumbai, on the west coast. Its operations began in 1989, with the production of PVC containers. Today, the facility manufactures 5 g to 125 g weight bottles and containers, on Japanese technology single-stage systems. All the units are located in a Class 1 (100,000 ppm) clean cham- ber. Bottles are packed and then pass through a shrink tunnel, with no addi- tional processing. The facility in Haridwar, Uttara- khand, 200km north of New Delhi, has machines that produce preforms from injection moulding processes and bottles from single stage process.The Umbergaon Gujarat plant, located south of Silvassa, specialises in wide-mouth preforms and containers and is the larg- est facility in the group. The containers are produced on two-stage systems. Preforms are produced on state-of-the- art machines from global brands, then blown into bottles in a stretch-blow unit on semi-automatic SBMs. The most popular is a 90ml bottle; 20-25 million examples are produced per month. The plant hosts a modern injection-moulding production facility, located within an air-conditioned envi- ronment. The workhorses are host of Japanese technology machines, which mainly produce preforms for wide- mouth containers, but the key feature of the plant is undoubtedly the Class 1 clean chamber, where large capacity German-origin machines produce pre- forms for aseptic filling lines. Sunpet believes in continuous improvements and its operations team endeavours to improve product quality, machine effi- ciency, reliability and energy consump- tion under the company’s Manufactur- ing Excellence initiative. It has seen some significant investments – such as a 560kW roof-mounted solar system – but it also sees small, incremental improvements that make a differ- ence: such as a tray located next to a machine to hold tools; or excellent logistical planning, right down to each carton having its own defined space; or threads tied to a ventilation outlet so that people can see at a glance that all the fans are working. Fifty per cent of its plastic mate- rial production is accounted for by the processing of preforms across all its facilities; 35% is dedicated to bottles and 15% to PET jars for food applica- tions. TPAC exports 15% of its output by revenue value, primarily to the F.r.t.l.: Mr Kasi and Mr Subramanian in discussions with Kay Barton