Kraft Foods to Invest £6 Million in New Cadbury Packaging
Kraft Foods UK is to invest £6 million in new a shelf-ready packaging format for its Cadbury range of chocolate bars, enabling the product to stand upright in order to attract the attention of shoppers. “Installation of the new packaging equipment at the famous factory in Bournville will begin in the New Year,” says Nick Bunker, president of Kraft Foods UK. “Shelf-ready packaging allows retailers to simply remove the front of the case containing the chocolate bars and put it straight on to the stores’ shelves.”
The new packaging for Cadbury Dairy Milk, Whole Nut and Fruit and Nut range will entail springs fitted within the cardboard boxes to prevent the bars from falling down and to push the confectionery forward each time one is removed.
Kraft Foods recently announced plans to invest £50 million in its UK confectionery manufacturing operations while cutting the workforce by 200 people. The 200 jobs will be shed at Kraft’s sites at Bournville, Birmingham, Chirk in Wrexham, north Wales, and Marlbrook in Herefordshire. The cuts will be made through redeployment and voluntary redundancies over two years from March 2012.
Kraft will invest £6 million in a new biscuits line at its site in Sheffield, which produces sugar confectionery products such as Trebor, Maynards and Bassetts, to facilitate the manufacture of Oreo and BelVita biscuits in the UK for the first time.
The remaining investment will be made on a range of projects to upgrade infrastructure, speed up production, reduce waste and improve energy efficiency at three chocolate confectionery manufacturing sites – Bournville, Chirk and Marlbrook.
