Hot and humid conditions are great for growing all manner of fruit and vegetables, but can be a tricky environment to pack, store and transport produce.
Temperatures in regions such as the Caribbean and South America can easily surpass 40°C during the harvest season, while in refrigeration units such as trucks and cold chambers used to keep fruits and vegetables fresh, temperatures can be as low as 3°C.
Finding an adhesive that can perform equally well in these very hot and cold conditions is a constant battle for fruit and veg producers, so how do they go about this?
The answer is to use an adhesive whose properties are sufficiently balanced to ensure strength and durability at high temperatures, and enough flexibility to maintain adhesion at very low temperatures. Thus, these contrasting requirements were the starting points for the development of our new agricultural box BAM 2500 adhesive.
Another challenge faced by the industry, are the short harvest times and the need to get products to the customer quickly and in good condition. Often this means constructing boxes in very high numbers – sometimes up to 1,500 per hour.
Our new BAM 2500 adhesive, therefore, needed to be able to create strong, secure bonds quickly – often in less than one second – to ensure reliability during packing, storage and transport to the final destination, without failures in the assembly stage, which compromises productivity during the harvest.
Finally, cost is another, and ever-present issue facing fruit and vegetable producers, which is why BAM 2500 was developed to reduce the overall consumption of adhesive by up to 25%. This, combined with the adhesives fast-setting speed, thermal stability and flexibility at low temperatures, helps producers lower the overall cost of production.
If you want to know more about our hot-melt adhesives for the agricultural box industry, please send an email to marketing@beardowadams.com and a member of our expert team will be in contact.