As you know, we recently moved to Holyoke Massachusetts, one of the first planned cities in the United States and one that still gets most of its electricity from renewable sources. We are still completing the renovations of our new old building to meet our needs but work on our customers’ machine is our highest priority. At one point Holyoke had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the United States. Now it is over 30% Hispanic and one of the poorest cities in the State.
Holyoke City Hall in the sunlight
Holyoke is in the process of reinventing itself and I have been struck by the beauty and variety of the architecture of the older buildings. I had dinner Saturday night in a McKim Mead and White designed building, built in the 1920’s that was gorgeous on the outside and in. I hope someone buys it and turns it into a restaurant that brings visitors to it. It has clearly been loved over the years. It should be a public space again. Holyoke has hired an arts coordinator for the City and it shows in how artists re moving to Holyoke. I also attend an exhibit of Jerome Liebling photographs which is now at City Hall in the Holyoke Library space. It is well worth a visit.
So what relevance does that have to Package Machinery, custom wrapping machines and you as a reader of this? A lot, I hope.
Our machine designs go back past the 1920’s and we still support them. But, like Holyoke, we continue to reinvent ourselves. In 2001, we reinvented the original overwrapper, the FA, to a servo overwrapping machine the FA-ST.
Most recently, we have upgraded the FFH high speed frozen food wrapper to the FFH-ST. See the video of the machine running at 140 per minute wrapping with waxed paper.
What comes next? We are looking at revamping our diefold wrapper the DF machine which runs at 150 packages per minute, our VersaFlow machine which overwrapped at 350 packages per minute back in the 1960’s. The richness of our engineering design library offers opportunities to reinvent the right machine for our customers’ needs.
I won’t tell you about the top secret project on which we are hard at work until our customer is satisfied with its performance, but, rest assured, we are using our creativity honed on all those years of building wrapping machines for a great collaboration and a completely new machine. More to come on that this summer!!