Plant keeps up with hair care styles: Alberto-Culver's headquarters plant must cater to variations in products, secondary packaging and other factors

Food & Drug Packaging, August, 2004 by Pan Demetrakakes

The Alberto-Culver plant in the Chicago suburb of Melrose Park, Ill., is side by side with the corporate headquarters and has literally grown with the company. When Alberto-Culver executives look around, they can point out how this production area used to be a warehouse, those areas were added on, that side grew after the company bought out an adjacent business, and so on. It all adds up to the physical manifestation of a business that's as healthy as the heads of hair in its ads.

The main production plant in Melrose Park now boasts 12 packaging lines and 300 employees in half a million square feet. The plant works two shifts a day, sometimes three, producing Alberto-Culver's mainstay consumer products: VO5 and TRESemme hair-care products, St. Ives skin lotions, Motions hair care products for African Americans, and others.

Beer today, gone tomorrow

Flexibility in production is as important in personal care as in any other consumer sector. Hair- and skin-care products go through fads and phases every bit as volatile as any low-carb craze. Food-based concepts, like beer- and egg-based shampoo, give way to fragrance-evoking themes like flowers and herbs, which yield to vitamins and other nutrients.

"We simply develop products that address current needs," says Stephen Carter, group manager of packaging engineering.

Even more than formulation changes, the plant must stay on top of trade promotions. Whenever VO5 puts out, for instance, a "25% more free" bottle, the plant must adjust to the larger size on the line. Other adjustments must be made for instant redeemable coupons affixed to bottles and similar outserts, as well as multiple display combinations. Then there are new product lines, like VO5 Nourishing Oasis, and recent acquisitions like Pro-Line Int'l and Pantresse.

It adds up to more than 2000 total stock keeping units (SKUs), with well over 400 of these being new in a given year. VO5 shampoo alone has more than a dozen "flavors" on shelves at one time.

More adjustments are needed in secondary, packaging. The most important of these, so far, is the demand by Wal-Mart and many other trade customers for six-count cases instead of the standard 12-count. This slows down packaging lines and makes cubing out a stable pallet much trickier.

"Even though we want to please the customer, going to six-packs is not that easy," Carter says. Several years ago, Alberto-Culver started packaging some products in "split-apart" corrugated cases--12-count boxes with a perforated divider in the middle. The boxes can be split in two to form six-count cases. But Carter says that trade customers are increasingly insisting on "true" six-count cases instead of the breakaparts.

Blow by blow

Packaging at Melrose Park starts with blow molding. Like other hair-care packagers, Alberto-Culver often uses polyvinyl chloride (PVC) bottles for shampoo because of their clarity, and naturally opaque high-density polyethylene (HDPE) for cloudy products like conditioners and lotions.

Many of the PVC and HDPE bottles used at the Melrose Park main facility are manufactured on-site. Resin is extruded into parisons, which are captured in a multi-cavity mold and blow molded. The bottles are trimmed of top and bottom tails, which are ground for reuse. Some of the bottles travel from the blow molding room directly to the hoppers of certain packaging lines. Workers sort the others into large corrugated boxes for manual transport to other lines.

As with many well-established plants, some of the Melrose Park facility's lines are faster and more modern than others. One of the fastest, at more than 250 bottles per minute, is dedicated to 15-ounce V05 products (the most common size).

On this line, bottles are conveyed directly from the blow molding area to the hopper of an unscrambler. This bottle sorter is part of a monobloc system from Ronchi America that also includes a filler and a capper. Monobloc systems are the norm for the plant's fastest lines, Carter says, because their integrated material handling allows for faster throughput.

"On our smaller lines, it's more of a modular set up, where we can separate and automate the packaging steps with a piece of equipment here and there," he says.

The bottles are filled in a 40-head volumetric rotary filler and capped in a 16-chuck capper. As they emerge single-file, inspectors, with the aid of mirrors, check for cocked caps and bottles with product residue on the walls (the latter are wiped and returned to the line).

The bottles then enter a labeler from SIG Alfa, where pressure-sensitive film labels are applied. Clear film is a common label material for VO5 products, especially with opaque bottles; a high-quality film can make almost as much of a visual impact as hot-stamping or other sophisticated decorating. One of Alberto-Culver's main label suppliers is CCL Industries Inc.

Making the case

After another round of visual inspection, the bottles head for case packing. The system consists of a case erector and case sealer, both from A-B-C Packaging Machine Corp., and a drop mechanism front Hartness International.