10 years after the launch of a high quality, ‘no taint’ hot melt adhesive, its UK manufacturer, Beardow Adams, says that it is still achieving conquest sales for its BAMFutura range among confectionery and food producers around the world.
“A major European food and confectionery business has recently approved BAMFutura 5, a low viscosity hot melt for high speed packaging of chocolate, following concerns about the traditional smell associated with hot melt adhesives and the potential tainting of dairy based food stuffs and chocolate,” says Paul Addison, Beardow Adams’ R&D Manager. “It is one of several BAMFutura products for the food and confectionery markets that overcome tainting through the use of high quality raw materials.”
A Colombian manufacturer of wrapped chocolate bars is now using another BAMFutura product – 6 – to benefit from its low tainting feature and its ability to bond both the carton board wraps of individual bars and its point of sale cartons that use a ‘difficult’ board requiring a high adhesion hot melt.
“Another application is roll wrapping,” says Mr Addison; “there are BAMFutura hot melts for both paper over foil wraps and plastic film.
“In the USA, a major confectionery producer has started using BAMFutura+Plus 501 on an Autowrapers (Bradman Lake) machine for a paper-over-foil wrap on a mint and menthol sweet – a flavour combination notoriously difficult to bond due to the highly volatile essential oils used.”
In the UK, another global confectionery company reports that it found BAMFutura 3 to give ‘superb performance’ on plastic wrappers for rolls of jelly and pastille sweets.
BAMFutura 1 – perhaps the most versatile product in the BAMFutura range – is used in Australia by a multi-national confectionery giant at one of its plants for sealing the cartons of over a dozen different products and in the UK by another multi-national for individual cartons of medicated sweets.
“BAMFutura hot melts eliminate odours and fumes in the production process – many traditional hot melts have a distinctive smell that can be a cause of tainting,” says Mr Addison.
“By switching to BAMFutura, companies using the EN 1230-2:2001 method for testing the organoleptic properties of packaging materials (commonly known as the ‘Robinson taint test’) should find that the intensity of the odour or off-flavour is rated at the lowest score – zero.”
In addition, Beardow Adams claims that BAMFutura hot melts have a high resistance to oxidation. “Oxidation causes a build up of char in the hot melt tank and viscosity changes which together create blocked application nozzles, unsightly ‘cobwebbing’ of the hot melt and unnecessary production stoppages,” says Mr Addison. “The purity of BAMFutura’s raw materials eliminates this, so leading to continuous, trouble free production.
So successful is the BAMFutura brand that it now accounts for over a third of Beardow Adams’ sales worldwide. The adhesives can be used to bond packs, cartons, cases and roll wrapped sweets.