An important base for the industry's top players and the area's leading importer of packaging-beverage technology, the country will soon host the second edition of Food + Bev Tec. Needless to say, the Sacmi Group will play a central role at the fair, showcasing its latest developments on the plant integration and weight reduction fronts.

The Ethiopian market's leading provider of cap and PET preform manufacturing technology, Sacmi will shortly be exhibiting at Food + Bev Tec 2018, the international fair to be held in the capital Addis Abeba as part of the Ethiopia Agrofood event (3-5 May 2018, Millennium Hall).

Ethiopia, Central East Africa's biggest importer of packaging and food processing technology (+19% in just five years), sees Sacmi as a technological leader that is fully accredited with the main local and international players in the industry; in recent years those players have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in both new plants and the upgrade of existing ones.

All the main water and soft drink bottlers in Ethiopia are supplied by converters who produce caps and preforms with Sacmi machines. Within this scenario, there is a gradual yet unstoppable market trend towards a lightweight future (i.e. a reduction in cap and container weight without any drop in performance) that will result in optimal use of resources and allow more environmentally sustainable production.

The use of 1881 necks for CSDs and standard 29/25 ones for still water will soon be commonplace for most industry players. Given this, Sacmi is already taking steps to provide the market with dedicated moulds and solutions that are already certified all over the world. These developments, the outcome of close teamwork between the Sacmi Beverage and Sacmi Closures&Containers Divisions, has allowed the Group to succeed in Africa as an all-round technological partner, the only supplier in the world capable of offering bottlers a turnkey “from pellet to pallet” plant.

For example, new developments in this regard include Sacmi Heroblock, the beating heart of the new Sacmi HeroLine, the first all-in-one solution that combines every stage of container/cap production, filling and labelling as a single, high performance process. With Heroblock, the number of handling tasks is minimised and integration of the various processes makes weight reduction easier, paving the way for a green packaging future that is, without any exceptions, going to involve the entire global beverage market.

Sacmi, which will be at the fair, operates in Africa through two branches (Casablanca, Cape Town), both dedicated to developing packaging-beverage technology and providing a full range of customer consultancy and after-sales assistance services. These branches provide solid support, complementing the services provided by the Sacmi Beverage R&D facility, which is certified by the industry's top international players.