Packaging machine manufacturer GIC and Stourgarden are celebrating 21 years of working together, in which time one of the UK’s leading suppliers of onions has seen demand grow by over 500 per cent!
Stourgarden was established by brothers Bill and John Rix in 1995 when they won a contract to supply Tesco.
Today, the third-generation family business still grows onions on the Essex and Suffolk border, as well as sourcing onions locally and from around the world to ensure a year-round supply.
In 2002 Bill approached GIC for a quote to add a vertical form fill and seal packaging machine to Stourgarden’s single packing line. At that time, just 45 tonnes per week were leaving Stourgarden’s site near Colchester. Today, that volume has increased to more than one million packs per week.
The first GIC machines – two VFB2000s – were bought in August 2002 and installed at Stourgarden’s Lodge Farm packhouse in early 2003. Both VFB2000s featured maintenance-free full servo drive systems, Markem Smartdate coder, discharge pack elevator and a stainless steel drip tray.
As demand for Stourgarden’s onions increased, the company upgraded the VFB2000s to VFB8000s in 2007. Two years later, Stourgarden added a third packing line and ordered another VFB8000. All three machines were upgraded in the summer of 2016, with three GIC8000s being installed.
The GIC8000 is a high-speed continuous motion vertical form fill and seal packaging machine capable of handling 65 packs of onions per minute.
The latest generation features maintenance-free Allen Bradley Rockwell servo motor drives for all machine movements, including film feed, crimp jaw opening and closing, and crimp jaw vertical motion. The ten-inch operator-friendly HMI colour touch screen controls are complemented by tool-free size changing, a fully-integrated coder station, reel run-out detection, and an out-of-tolerance temperature sensor on the Heat Seal Crimp Jaws.
Such is the build quality of GICs machines that all of the VFB models supplied to Stourgarden are still operating at other food manufacturers today.
As well as supplying the machines, GIC has also serviced them for 21 years, ensuring that the machines operate efficiently and with minimal downtime.
“Stourgarden is a fantastic story, and we are very proud to have played a small part in their success,” says Andy Beal, managing director of GIC. “Bill and the team at Stourgarden have grown the business significantly since we first met in July 2002. A lot has happened in the last 21 years, but I think the approach of both companies has stayed the same. We have always tried our best to offer a high-quality product backed up with excellent customer service and look to form long-standing relationships with our customers. I think we’ve achieved this as every time Stourgarden has increased its packing capacity, they’ve ordered a new machine from us.”
Currently, Stourgarden is supplying Tesco with over a million onions every day. However, in the pandemic’s first week, this reached over two million per day!
“When restaurants shut during the early stages of the pandemic, and home cooking increased, we saw a major shift in our business,” says Bill. “Thankfully, we are quite an agile business with a great team. By having the most up-to-date technology and machinery in place at Lodge Farm, we were able to adapt very quickly. Having GIC’s 8000s at the end of our packing lines enabled us to ramp up production and played a key part in supplying Tesco with the extra volume they required. Knowing that Andy and his team were only an hour or two away was also reassuring.
“Growing the business over the last 21 years has been a team effort, and we like to think that all of our suppliers are part of that team success, GIC is great example of just that.”
