A little over 10 years ago, Peter Fox opened the North American subsidiary of Germany-based SOMIC Group. 

A 35-year veteran of the packaging industry, Fox has worked for Kraft Foods, the Pillsbury Company, Delkor Systems and Interpress Technologies. He was named CEO of SOMIC Packaging in 2021.

Since 2014, SOMIC Packaging has successfully gained a foothold in the North American packaging market and last year moved to new headquarters in Minnesota, quadrupling workspace to 48,000 square feet and allowing assembly of all new North American purchased machines.

While the German parent company celebrated its 50^th anniversary last year, SOMIC Packaging marked a decade of packaging progress across a variety of machinery types and industries served. 

Today, SOMIC receives all the components for its machinery in from Germany and they are assembled, commissioned and shipped to customers. They have installed about 200 end-of-line packaging machines with nearly 60% of their equipment placed with manufacturers using a refrigerated environment.

Retail-Ready, Other Trends in Cold Foods Packaging

Peter Fox joins From the Cold Corner to discuss end of line and retail ready packaging for the refrigerated and frozen foods market and more.

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“We really led with the retail-ready concept. Retail-ready packaging in the frozen sector has been lagging. Aldi Foods is the leader in this category. SOMIC is well ahead of the U.S. market in regards to retail-ready automated packaging technology. We have introduced many innovative machines to the market, and frankly, we are waiting for the market to catch up to us,” Fox said.

We've expanded our staff to 45 people and the primary reason for moving these additional activities over to the United States are, first and foremost, to help reduce some of the burden on our parent company in terms of the space and resources that they have. But, more importantly than that, it gets us closer to our customers, and it gets us more engaged with the entire machine building process.”

The differences between European and U.S. packaging needs are “really pretty significant,” Fox said. 

“When you walk into a grocery store in Europe or Germany, specifically, you'll find that most of the products are arriving at that store in a tray with cover and that display tray is oftentimes a very high value material,” he said. “I'll take sliced cheese, for example. Sliced cheese in the United States is typically packaged in a flow pack with a zipper on it. And in Europe, we're used to seeing it in a thermal form, like a package with a resealable lid on it, and we're starting to see some of that being introduced into the United States specifically through some of retailers like Aldi. So, using that Aldi example, everything that comes into Aldi has to be in has to be packaged in a way that it can immediately be put on shelf.”

As technology like machine learning and AI is built into new applications, Fox said his advice to cold food processors and manufacturers looking for packaging solutions is to keep it simple. 

“Our job as machine providers is that we have to make it so that our machine is not scary, that it's easy to operate. It's not intimidating. It's comfortable for someone to interact with,” Fox said. “I don't expect much to evolve on the secondary packaging side, but I do believe most of the advancements will be happening on the primary packaging side of things. I think we will see many more products being packed in flexible films with a reduction of plastic serving trays.  There will be more kitting of products in barrier films for frozen meal kits instead of microwaving and eating."

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