agap2 participates in the manufacture of eco-designed packaging

agap2 is supporting VisioDune in the manufacture of eco-designed packaging using up to 97% less plastic

Dune is an innovative company in the field of bread and pastry packaging. Today, the company is taking on a new challenge with its new eco-designed packaging for pastries. Meet Audric Perrin, Design Office Manager at Dune.

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What is the mission of Dune and what are you working on right now?

A.P: Dune specialises in the development of machines and consumables for packaging products while reducing the use of plastic.

Dune’s solution consists of flexible packaging with two sides: one made of recyclable paper and the other thin polypropylene, which is also recyclable. Unlike the large rigid plastic packaging often used in supermarkets for pastries, the VisioDune solution developed by Dune reduces the amount of plastic by 97%.

What’s more, the transparent polypropylene window showcases the product, giving it a more authentic, traditional look.A major innovation of the Dune machines is their ability to automatically create bags from consumables in reel form, adapted to the size of the products to be packaged.

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What is the project’s current phase?

A.P:  Dune, which has been active in this field for almost 30 years, recently extended its area of expertise to include pastries with the development of the multi-functional Cérès machine.

This machine has been a great success with mass-market retailers, offering semi-automatic packaging capacity for a wide variety of products. The Cérès requires manual intervention to insert the products into the pre-formed bag and to close it with a label.

To meet growing demand and expand its market into more industrial environments, Dune has launched the development of a new fully automatic machine: the Neptune.

It is capable of creating bags adapted to the dimensions of the products, automatically inserting the product using a conveyor belt and hermetically sealing the bags.

Having validated the feasibility of this technology, Dune’s design office began work on the design and construction of a prototype.

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Why did you call on agap2 for this project?

A.P: During this crucial phase, Dune called on agap2 to strengthen its design office team and make progress on the Neptune prototype. The company was looking for a mechanical design engineer with mechatronics skills to join the team.

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Field expertise

Kilian, Mechanical design engineer.

Working in a small design office at Dune, responsibilities are well distributed to ensure rapid and efficient progress in the development of the machine.

What excites me most about this project is the variety of tasks I get to do. I can just as easily be behind a screen doing modelling as in the workshop assembling. Even if every day and every task are planned, there are always unforeseen events and challenges.

This is the very essence of research and development: starting from point A and working your way to point B, often along a winding road.

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