Are pharmaceutical companies pinching pennies in the recession and packing blisters into cartons, or are they starting to dig a little deeper to reap the benefits offered by wallets? Lynda Searby finds out

The spirit of Henry Ford, who famously remarked "You can have any colour as long as it's black" of Ford's Model T in 1909, is very much alive in the pharmaceutical blister packaging industry 100 years on.

In the words of the not-quite-as-famous David Spackman, director at MeadWestvaco (MWV) Healthcare, "Most equipment in Europe is set up to handle folding cartons, blisters and leaflets, so you can have any package you like, as long as it's a folding carton."

Most of the time this doesn't actually matter. After all, if pharmaceutical brand owners want a basic, functional pack that will sit squarely in a bathroom cabinet, the carton will do the job perfectly.

However, several consumer trends are prompting brand owners to consider formats other than the ubiquitous carton for presenting blisters.

MWV carried out in-depth interviews with consumers in Munich, Paris and London earlier this year, and the message that came out of this exercise was that they wanted portable, easy to use and discreet healthcare packaging.

"Our research showed that consumers often take medication when they are on the go. It's common for them to put a couple of pills in a pocket or purse for the day. At the same time they don't want it to be obvious when they take medication in public," says Spackman.

In addition, self-medication is on the up, which, according to Carsten Peters, pharma sales manager with Schubert, is elevating the importance of both convenience and patient compliance.

Wallets lead the pack
Close collaboration between brand owners, packaging designers and equipment manufacturers has resulted in the arrival of some truly innovative blister packaging formats - mainly based on folding or sliding wallets.

Nycomed-owned German pharmaceutical manufacturer Altana, for example, won a Red Dot design award for its Pantoprazole Mini Blister wallet pack, which was designed in conjunction with machinery partners IMA Safe and Schubert. The pack comprises a wallet containing a blister card in a size smaller than usual for a weekly dosage. Packs for birth control pills manufactured by Bayer Schering are also produced on Schubert walleting equipment. These consist of a handy folding card with glued-in blisters.

Burgopak's patented sliding packs are being used for paracetamol and ibuprofen on sale at Boots, Alliance and Moss chemists. These are produced on custom-designed Bosch machinery installed at contract packer Brecon Pharmaceuticals in Hereford and essentially consist of a wallet combined with an open-ended folded box.

Across the Atlantic, Forest Laboratories is using wallets made on a Dividella NeoWallet machine to improve patient compliance. With these packs, the blisters, carton and insert remain as one unit through the period of use.

Differentiation does, however, come at a cost. Walleting machines are not only more expensive than cartoning machines, but are also slower.

"A wallet line is more expensive than a standard blister cartoning line because it has a configuration dedicated to the product," says Agostino Consolini, marketing director with IMA Safe. "Product speeds are in the mid range; it is not possible to have very high speeds."

Similarly, Bosch product manager Benjamin Leins says: "The sliding wallet is a little more expensive and a little bit slower than normal lines because you have more production steps to go through."

To give an indication of speeds, Schubert's Carsten Peters says wallet machines typically run at about 150 to 200 packs per minute, whereas state-of-the-art side-load cartoning machines will easily achieve 400 to 500 packs per minute.

Bridging the gap
That said, Schubert has managed to go some way to closing this gap with its installations at Altana and Bayer Schering.

Altana's requirement was for a machine capable of forming and filling 300 wallets per minute, grouping the wallets, inserting booklets and placing several wallets in a flip-top carton.

"All our machines are intermittent in motion, so in order to gain speeds we carry out multiple functions simultaneously, for example, rather than forming one or two wallets at a time, we form 12," says Peters.

IMA Safe's Consolini adds that a dedicated link between the IMA Safe blister machine and the Schubert wallet machine creates a buffer, reducing the effects of stoppages.

At Bayer Schering, blisters are packed into wallets at a rate of 330 per minute, thanks to several design features. Firstly, size changes are completed in 20 minutes, and secondly, a product buffer with a volume of eight minutes provides for an efficient interface between the blister packer and walleting operation.

The higher price of walleting equipment, however, is not something that is easily overcome. Peters estimates that a walleting line like the one installed at Altana would cost about twice as much as a standard side load cartoning machine with leaflet insertion. But, for that, he is unapologetic.

"We are talking about two machines," he explains, "a walleting machine and in the frame, a cartoning machine. Also, our machines are modular in build, whereas if you look at traditional machine building companies, they take an application and a speed and from those parameters they build a certain machine model. We don't take that approach - we build a custom frame and within that, place function modules like robotics, folding and gluing applications, leaflet insertion and so on. It's like a Lego-building exercise."

He also points out that walleting is a niche product for specific applications, where brand owners believe it is worth their while to pay the premium. "It's not a volume market and nor will it become one," he says.

Indeed, for the vast majority of products, pharmaceutical manufacturers and brand owners don't think it's worth paying a premium for wallet packs and prefer to stick to conventional cartons. 

Cutting the cost of cartoning
Cartoning might be much cheaper than walleting, but according to Keith Gooch, managing director of Logic TPS Systems, pharmaceutical companies want more value still from their blister cartoning lines.

"We have had a lot of interest in our Korean-built Hoonga range recently from companies such as Astra Zeneca, Reckitt Benckiser and Glaxo, where management are asking project teams to look at emerging markets for equipment that will help reduce cost per unit."

Besides being cheaper, because they are built in Asia rather than Europe, the Hoonga machines can help pharmaceutical companies save on packaging costs.

"Normally if you're packing five or six blisters into a carton, the machine just stacks them one on top of the other. The Hoonga machine interlocks the blisters before inserting them in the carton, so you can fit more in a pack."

A smoother and speedier transfer from blister packer to cartoner is another way of driving down the cost of blister cartoning lines. To this end, Romaco has integrated a four-track direct blister transfer system, branded the Quick Transfer, into its new Noack T4 blister packaging line. This servo driven unit is said to enable a direct and controlled transfer of blisters regardless of the blister configuration.

A third way?
But what if you don't want to go for a conventional carton, and can't stretch to a wallet? Is there no middle ground? Until very recently, there wasn't. However, MWV has used its consumer research findings to develop Med-Easy - a consumer-friendly pack that is also manufacturer-friendly.

"We recognised that while there were innovative designs in the marketplace, some of them require companies to either outsource to a contract packer or make a sizeable investment in kit themselves," explains Spackman. "We developed Med-Easy with that in mind and have come up with a design that can be made on existing blister cartoning lines.

"We can't say at the moment which equipment manufacturers we have been working with but there have been no issues running this pack. The only change required is modification of the infeed, so we don't expect the cost to be significant - tens of thousands of euros rather than two million euros for a new line."

So it seems that for the blister pack market the options are ever increasing. Yes, it might be early days - Med-Easy was only launched in September - but already the spectrum of blister packaging formats is looking far more colourful.

BLISTER-PACK ROUND-UP
• New machines from the Logic TPS stable in the last 12 months have included a high-speed blisterer and a low-cost blisterer. The Hoonga HM 400P is a servo-driven platen sealing blister machine with an output of 400 blisters, while the HM 300B, launched at Achema, costs less than €200,000 and packs 300 blisters a minute with a low tooling cost

• IMA Safe’s C80HS-A96 is an integrated blister line designed for the production of medium batches and frequent size changeovers. IMA claims it can reach speeds of up to 700 blisters and 450 cartons per minute