Chinese funding to cut specialist food packaging imports – worrying trend?

By Rory Harrington,

A Chinese packaging company said it is to receive multi-million dollar government funding to expand its operations and reduce domestic reliance on specialist packing imports.

Shiner International announced this week that the development of its Packaging Industrial Park project in Hainan will be part-funded by a government grant of RMB 29m ($4.26m).

Domestic boost

The company, which specialises in food safe and anti-counterfeiting packaging, said the cash will be used in the construction of a new facility. The Chinese Government gave the green light to the funding because the plant will help domestic food manufacturers reduce their reliance on having to buy specialist film packing applications from overseas, said the company.

Shiner CEO Jian Fu said: “For quite some time, the Chinese domestic market has relied on the importing of high quality packaging films for high-end consumer products at great expense to Chinese manufacturers. In recent years, the central government has begun to realise the importance of domestically developed key technology products that utilise intellectual property that is developed and owned by Chinese companies such as Shiner.”

Funding for its packaging project will allow the Chinese outfit to make its patented products in a state-of-the-art facility, he added. The money will be used for construction of infrastructures, improvement of capacity and recruitment of senior technical staff for the project.

via Chinese funding to cut specialist food packaging imports.

Edible codes for cheese – not another cheesey story…

Het Kaasmerk BV in, Leiden, the Netherlands, is a manufacturer of assorted blocks of cheese. Kassmerk has been collaborating with Isotron Systems on the traceability and quality control of its cheese for some time.Isotron Systems is the distributor of Cognex vision and identification equipment in the Netherlands. Kassmerk adopted a Cognex DataMan 7500 system to read the codes marked on its individual blocks of cheese.The two-dimensional codes are applied early in the production process and need to be read at the end of production.The only bar-code identification equipment Kaasmerk could find that was capable of working with the blocks of cheese, despite Kaasmerk’s rigorous industrial environment, was the In-Sight Vision System and the DataMan 7500 reader, which are both from Cognex.Identification codes, such as a 2D code or data matrix, are not only applied to state-of-the-art technology products, they are also applied to food products.These codes are mandatory in Europe, and are also necessary for safeguarding of food quality during production. They help minimise food-safety risks after the production phase, because each end product can be individually traced back to the production lot.Passport to traceabilityThe ability to identify each individual cheese as a unique item in the production chain is an essential component. Actually applied to the cheese block itself, the code functions as a veritable passport.

via Edible codes for cheese.