Providing Volumes of Information in a Pouch

Lauraville Packaging LLC (Syracuse, NY) exhibited its solutions at EastPack for encapsulating flat items such as booklets, pamphlets, and others into adhesive-backed pouches for application to flat packages. The filled pouches, which can be provided in rolls or fan folded in cartons, can be applied by a label applicator to packaging.

The company has been providing such solutions to industries that have required significant amounts of product information to be distributed to users, such as the agro-chemical industry, says James Mathewson, president and CEO. The business dates to 1983, when its predecessor, Northeast Packaging, began packaging directions for use for the agrochemical industry. It has since expanded into several industries and has even placed coupons, cards, and DVDs into pouches for on-product promotions.

Lauraville encapsulates the flat materials by laying them between two film webs and creating the pouches in-line in a continuous process. The minimum insert is 2 x 2 in., and it can go up to 8.5 x 11 in.

Multiple-page literature can be placed into pouches for automatic application to flat packaging.

Available designs include the Versa-Label, Smart-Pak, and the just-launched encapsul·Ad. Versa-Label and Smart-Pak can be customized to customer requirements, and Smart-Pak can utilize nearly all labelstock as the bottom web. Lauraville can work with customers’ preferred label printers or offer its own labeling partners. Designed to offer a turnkey, cost-effective design, encapsul·Ad is a standardized on-pack advertising solution.

Options for all designs include use of a 100% recycled material top web and other biodegradable films.

Mathewson suggests these solutions as alternatives to loose in-pack inserts and coupons or insecure on-pack attachments. They also offer an additional solution for particularly voluminous literature that cannot fit on regular expanded-content labels. While Lauraville’s designs cannot be applied to slightly curved surfaces such as bottles or tubes, they could be used for flexible packaging, cartons, pouches, and blister wallet cards.

Mathewson’s holding company Quarry Road Holdings LLC purchased Lauraville Packaging in January 2010 and sensed that it could help medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers provide regulatory-mandated product directions. The company has already produced testing samples for one medical device company.