With two plants in Mexico, the company that designs and delivers packaging solutions, Sealed Air , meets market demand in the country, including in Central America, with the production of packaging materials through the use of disruptive technologies , as well as the automation of its processes, and a supply chain resilient to changes.
Alejandro Pedraza , Equipment and Automation Leader for Mexico at Sealed Air, highlighted in an interview with T21 that the company has three very clear strategies regarding its operations, which are sustainability, differentiation through a hybrid printing system and automation.
“By automation we are referring to packaging lines, product packaging. With the new generation of equipment we are seeking to provide packaging solutions that allow our clients to optimize their resources and streamline processes by doing everything in an automated manner. This equipment allows us to have a much more efficient, more stable process, with a standardized quality and appearance of the product,” he stressed.
He said that automation allows them to have less expensive operations and to optimize their processes, by using equipment with technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) , as well as interconnections for fault diagnostics and remote alarms, and to perform process analysis, among other activities.
The company that invented the plastic bubble wrap has two production plants in Mexico ; one is located in Monterrey, Nuevo León, and the other in Toluca, State of Mexico.
The specialist specified that the Monterrey plant only manufactures bag materials, while the Toluca plant has two rollstock lamination technologies and also bags.
Pedraza said that both units use practically the same technology and that they have a good capacity to serve the market from Mexico, even Central America, so for now they have no plans to build a new unit.
“We import, we are processors. We import the raw material, for example, the bag, the tube in a bag, and we transform it either in Monterrey or in Toluca,” he emphasized.
Sealed Air’s Mexico facilities process approximately 60,000 tons of packaging materials per year .
The company is currently expanding the printing lines of its unit in Toluca . “We have a completely new hybrid printing press, a completely disruptive new technology that uses the best of both worlds between flexography, which is traditional printing, and digital printing,” he said.
“This machine, being a hybrid printing, allows us to reduce the amount of materials we have to deploy per run or produce per run. This will make it possible for us to reach clients with slightly smaller capacities or presentations that may seem complicated at some point,” he stressed.
In light of the entry into force of the 25% tariffs on various Mexican products by the United States, Alejandro Pedraza said that in this industry they are waiting for the actions that the Government of Mexico will undertake .
In this context, he said that the company’s supply chain comes from several countries, including the United States, although they are on alert to take measures to reduce the impact of tariffs.
“Although a lot of raw materials, including machinery, come from the United States, it is not our only source, but it would force us to take measures to minimize the impact of the tariff that the government may impose on raw materials or machinery coming from that country,” he explained.
He said that in this situation, they could diversify and bring in machines and materials from another sister plant in another part of the world other than the United States , or think about suppliers from South America, Asia or Europe. “The same applies to equipment; we have equipment or manufacturing suppliers in Switzerland, Italy and Japan,” he said.
He pointed out that they have a resilient supply chain , and indicated that “they have the capacity to change, although adjustments would have to be made to an emergency plan, but we are prepared in any case,” he added, and said that they distribute their products from their plants in Toluca and Monterrey to all of Mexico and Central America; sometimes they use strategic distributors as part of their logistics.
According to the firm, in the third quarter of 2024 the company’s net sales were US$1.35 billion , while its net profits reached US$89 million in that period.
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