Harpak-ULMA has announced the North American release of the ULMA TFX thermoformer, a next generation smart platform engineered to help food, medical and consumer packaged goods producers achieve higher throughput, enhanced package quality, and stronger sustainability performance. 

The TFX boasts multiple performance-enhancing innovations designed to reduce cycle time, stabilize process variation, and support the use of recyclable packaging materials.

ULMA designed its new range of high-performance TFX thermoformers to tackle some of today’s most demanding food packaging challenges — including production efficiency, sustainability, digitalization, and process repeatability. The TFX delivers synchronized high-speed performance, superior packaging quality, rapid error-proofed changeovers, intuitive operation, sustainable film, optimized materials usage, and smart, data-driven production management. It was engineered from the ground up to maximize efficiency, uptime, and environmental responsibility across modern packaging lines

The TFX line leverages optimized motion coordination and a redesigned vacuum system that shortens evacuation time — enabling faster, more predictable cycles for high-volume applications that can accelerate vacuum performance by up to 20 percent. 

These improvements are especially significant for producers packaging standardized “Brick-Packs,” a format rapidly expanding across major retailers. Packaged meat bricks require precise forming, rapid evacuation, and repeatable sealing to maintain their rigid geometry and minimize purge — making cycle-time stability and vacuum efficiency critical drivers of throughput and package integrity.

The TFX also integrates ULMA’s advanced forming and sealing  technologies, making it capable of running thinner base films without sacrificing package strength or integrity. 

This is particularly valuable for meat-brick applications, which rely on deep, dimensionally consistent forming and robust seals to maintain shape. Running thinner, recyclable materials without compromising rigidity allows processors to reduce plastic consumption while maintaining the visual appeal and durability expected by retailers and club store shoppers. This capability supports processors seeking reductions in plastic consumption and improved sustainability metrics.

Other advanced capabilities include automated film alignment, zone-specific heating, and constant-atmosphere sealing controls — features designed to improve first-pass yield and reduce rework. In meat-brick production, even minor film wander, uneven heating, or seal variation can result in notable deformation or purge leakage. Automated alignment and precision heating help ensure every brick maintains its crisp, consistent profile — essential for stacking, case packing, and warehouse-club merchandising. On-board tools such as RFID format verification, and recipe-driven digital control accelerate changeovers while reducing operator error.  

Centralized recipe control allows operators to auto-adjust settings based on production orders, while built-in monitoring tools track usage of film, electricity, air, and gas by shift or batch. At the end of each run, the system generates a detailed PDF report, giving manufacturers a comprehensive view of production performance.

This enables producers to pinpoint waste, validate sustainability improvements, and support continuous improvement initiatives. For meat-brick processors running extremely high volumes with tight retail cost-to-produce pressures, such insights help quantify the financial benefits of precision forming, reduced vacuum times, and lower material use — giving operations teams clear visibility into the true cost of each packaged unit. 

These digital records also support documentation requirements common in medical manufacturing, providing traceable, repeatable production data that can be leveraged during process validation and audit. This unique combination of innovative technologies delivers a thermoforming platform engineered for a new era of packaging automation and performance — one that helps processors unlock hidden line capacity, enhance product quality, and achieve more sustainable operations.

The company also announced a new application of the Mondini Trave Sinfonia tray-sealing platform designed explicitly for high-volume ground-meat production. The solution delivers a higher-output, fully automated alternative to conventional tray-sealing methods — setting a new performance benchmark for producers.

Sinfonia can effectively double throughput compared to typical mechanical grind-line tray sealers, increasing output from roughly 120 packs per minute to as high as 200 packs per minute. Sinfonia's software-controlled magnetic-transport architecture delivers this dramatic performance advantage by moving trays on independent shuttles with micron-level accuracy. The innovative design eliminates belts, pusher arms, and other friction-based components that typically constrain sealing speed, especially in low-oxygen MAP applications.

Although the Sinfonia system was introduced in 2023, this marks its first application for grind-line environments, where tray control, contamination, and mechanical indexing have long limited achievable speeds.

"The competitive ceiling for grind-line tray sealing is around 120 ppm. With Sinfonia, we can engineer a 200-ppm grind line—almost a 100% throughput increase," said Carlo Bergonzi, product manager, tray sealing at Harpak-ULMA. "Sinfonia fundamentally changes what's possible in ground-meat tray-sealed packaging," he added. "By controlling each tray independently, we remove the mechanical constraints that typically dictate line speed. The result is a faster, cleaner, and far more stable tray-sealing process that simply isn't achievable with conventional systems. Given the momentum behind meat-brick formats across major retailers, this application directly addresses the performance conversations we’re hearing from processors as they head into IPPE 2026.”

The new configuration integrates portioning, dual denesting, retractable conveyor loading, and a 14-up sealing array — enabling each processing station to run at its optimal rate without being limited by fixed-pitch conveyor mechanics. With the new Sinfonia application, producers gain a consistent, contamination-resistant tray path and simplified changeovers in a compact footprint. In contrast, competitive systems rely on mechanical indexing systems that cannot independently control tray motion. 

About Harpak-ULMA 
Harpak-ULMA Packaging is the North American arm of ULMA, a $1B industry leader in complete automated packaging line solutions for food, medical, and industrial products. Harpak-ULMA provides smart, connected packaging systems including tray sealing, thermoforming, horizontal ffs, vertical ffs, flow wrapping, multihead weighing, wet and dry filling systems, robotic loading and unloading systems, metal detection, x-ray, checkweighing, labeling, vision inspection, cartoning, sleeving, case packing, and palletizing. These systems form the backbone of complete, integrated lines that reduce customers’ total cost of ownership, address the challenges of an aging, scarce workforce, and improve maintenance and operations via Harpak-ULMA’s extensive service offerings and 24/7 support, and competitive parts sourcing with same-day shipping. In addition, Harpak-ULMA represents G. Mondini tray sealers and Cabinplant’s advanced weighing systems and complementary processing solutions in the United States and Canada. Since joining the Rockwell Automation Partner Network in 2018, Harpak-ULMA has leveraged Rockwell’s controls and information platforms to deliver greater efficiency, uptime, throughput, and package quality — while reducing waste.