Versano Coffee, a well-established family business from Melbourne, is one of a growing band of boutique coffee roasters supplying cafes and restaurants with premium products.
Founder Claude Conversano is not new to the market, however. He’s been roasting and packing coffee from Brazil and Columbia for cafés and restaurants for years.
“We buy raw beans, we put them into silos, they go into the roaster, through the cleaning system, and then they are packed,” he says.
Versano Coffee, like many at the smaller end of the market, however, still manually fills its 1kg bags.
“My daughter and wife have been doing all the packing, and they pack a couple of thousands bags of coffee a week,” Conversano says.
Though automated packing makes sense, he says, until now, entry-level packing machines have started at around $200,000 which meant they were not economically viable.
A new product from ADM Packaging Technology, however, could change that. Versano is looking to buy its new ADM-MD20 packing machine, which is designed to package pre-made 1kg gusseted and quad-seal pouches at a price point to suit smaller companies.
According to James Stefanou, a mechanical engineer at ADM, at around $40,000 – an average annual wage – the ADM-MD20 can pack more than 200,000 bags a year – eight times more than the average person comparable with a standard annual eight-hour roster.
“When companies are breaking into the market, they usually manually weigh, fill and seal pre-made bags using separate stand-alone machinery. However, as demand and product quotas increase, so does the need to create a more efficient and less labour intensive process.
The ADM-MD20, coupled with ADM-MX2 two head linear weigher, automatically retracts a pre-made pouch from a magazine, dates it, opens, fills and seals the bag, and expands it out ready to be packed,” Stefanou says.
He says there are lots of premium coffee roasters that sell their own blends to a small client base and as such, haven’t got high outputs.
Prior to this, he says, because of the high initial price tag, it was hard for these companies to make the jump from manual to automated packing to minimse the ever-increasing labour component.
