Licence to Chill

Tucking into yoghurt is now a lot easier than ever before, thanks to an Auckland industrial design and innovation company. Claire Le Couteur discovers how Inveratek Group Ltd took its squeezable plastic food container from concept to commercialisation.

Visit the chiller in your local supermarket and you'll find yoghurt and other dairy foods in a new kind of packaging. Its design allows you to drink the viscous contents straight from the container, without needing a spoon. Made from standard polystyrene sheets, the containers are taller than standard yoghurt pots and have vertical bellows on opposite sides, which allow you to squeeze out the last drop of contents in a controlled manner.

This revolution in food packaging is branded CrushPak®. The design can be used for hot- and cold-fill applications in quantities ranging from 20 to 200 grams and for products such as condiments, sauces and pastes. This is especially useful for food service applications such as in cafés or situations where small quantities of food are needed out of the home (like picnics), and where standardised measures are required, for example, a tablespoon of tomato paste.

Inveratek has licensed its product to Fonterra for use in dairy applications in New Zealand for a limited time. The feedback to date from Fonterra is that CrushPak® is selling well ahead of forecast and has surpassed its closest competitor in the market, despite the fact that it is more expensive on the shelf.

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Solving the design challenge

Inveratek partner Michael Kessell, a former mechanic, came up with the initial idea for CrushPak® after watching a small child trying to eat yoghurt without using a spoon. He recognised the design challenge in solving the child's problem.

Inveratek's VP of Engineering, Edward Scott, a mechanical engineer with 17 years' experience in industrial design and manufacture, had the job of designing and producing the new packaging idea.

Mr Scott was involved in extensive work on tooling and other processes needed to ensure CrushPak® would work. During the product development and prototyping phase, Inveratek worked with an external company on a small-scale vacuum-forming machine, producing literally dozens of iterations and ensuring a relatively quick turnaround. Later the company purchased and built most of the equipment needed to do the feasibility tests. The new design's main requirement was the material had to be strong enough to withstand the filling and shipping processes but flexible enough that a child or an elderly person with limited dexterity would be able to squeeze out the contents.

"To achieve this we looked at a host of different designs and forming processes to see which one would give us the best results," says Mr Scott. "The processes also needed to be as close to the existing industry standards as possible so that our potential customers would be able to take the pack and adapt their manufacturing lines or processes with very few changes. This would make switching to CrushPak® a quick and cost-effective process, which was vital if the product was to be fast-tracked to market."

The design team tested many different materials in their quest to produce the distinctive packaging. They found that all the current materials used for vacuum forming yoghurt pots worked very well, including high-impact polystyrene and polypropylene.

The CrushPak® yoghurt and dairy food products on sale in New Zealand are made of polystyrene, which is not yet accepted for recycling here. But Mr Scott sees no reason why they cannot be made of a recyclable plastic. "If 'ordinary' yoghurt pots can be made with recyclable material there is no reason why the same construction would not work for CrushPak®." In their favour, however, CrushPak® pots actually contain 35 per cent less material than other similar containers which means less material enters the waste stream. And because the packaging is crushed by the consumer it takes up less room in the bin.

The pots are strong and able to withstand double the top load of conventional yoghurt pots. The pack's vertical bellows help it withstand top-load forces exerted during the filling process, transportation and storage. This allows the packaging to be thinner than traditional packs. The triangular shape of the bellows also increases the integrity of the pack. Other similar packs with the same thickness as CrushPak® need to have sleeve labels to help add additional strength. This increases not only material costs but also handling and shipping costs.

Unique business model

CrushPak® is only one of the products designed and brought to market by the company.

"Our business model is unique, not only within New Zealand, but also globally," says Commercialization Manager Bradley Mitchell. "We work with people with great ideas but who don't have the resources to bring them to market – we aim to bridge the gap between the masses of ideas out there and the market where these ideas can be utilised. The business is all about maximising the value of intellectual property."

With a new product idea, Inveratek is involved from the outset, assisting in the earliest stages of development and advising on the best way to obtain legal protection for the innovation, which may involve a variety of patent or other intellectual property rights. Just as importantly, the company advises on the commercialisation of a new technology or innovation, which is the real determinant of whether an invention becomes financially successful.

The company's founder and CEO, Paul Adams, is an experienced intellectual property attorney with an extensive legal background. Before founding the company, Mr Adams built and managed the University of Auckland's technology incubator the Icehouse, and spent several years working in Silicon Valley. Mr Adams is passionate about good design and believes that it must be valued by everyone involved with product development.

The chairman of Inveratek is Professor Henry Bolanos, a United States engineer well known for his invention of laparascopic surgery and a holder of many patents for surgical instrumentation and other products. Professor Bolanos is visiting professor at Yale University and at the University of Virginia, as well as at the University of Auckland.

Inveratek is funded by a small number of United States investors who have had a long-term association with the company and focus primarily on technology companies with high-growth potential. Ideas and innovations largely arrive at Inveratek from external sources, as do requests for advice, because the process of commercialisation is so complex. "An idea on its own has little value – it's how you go about commercialising it that makes the difference," says Mr Mitchell. "It has taken years for us to master the process of protecting and commercialising products."

Each case requires the company to consider many factors such as whether obtaining a patent is the best way forward (not always the case according to Mr Mitchell) or more extensive study of design registrations, trademarks and trade secrets is warranted. "Just what the organisation or inventor wants out of their technology, what their capabilities are and the amount of risk that they are prepared to take are all important considerations."

The company maximises the value of the product by targeting key players in each market and application space. This does not limit the company to having only one licensee per country, though this is currently the case in New Zealand for CrushPak®. The product is also licensed in parts of the United States and in Europe, where there can be multiple users in a single jurisdiction. Licensing gives the company the opportunity to be very flexible in how the ideas can generate value.

Flow and seal

Inveratek has two other products that have been commercialised to date. One is a revolutionary kind of ball-valve for fluid control, considered by the company to be the most significant development in fluid control technology since 1945. ProFlow™ is a reciprocating ball-valve technology that removes the need for a bulky external activator which means it can be used in areas where space is at a premium. It can been used in areas as diverse as oil and gas exploration, process control, disposable drink containers, medical devices – in fact anywhere a conventional ball valve is used. ProFlow™ works by rotating the unit itself – very fast and with very little torque.

The other invention is VeraSeal™, a technology that replaces the usual threaded closures on plastic blow-moulded bottles. The product was designed to overcome problems faced by dairy producers when their milk bottles made from HDPE (high-density polyethylene) leak. The moulding process leaves an imperfect neck edge that does not produce a good seal and this can lead to spoilage and losses for retailers. VeraSeal™ can be manufactured using existing technology without adding significant costs to the end product.

Licensing agreements are currently being negotiated for these two new applications and as a result the company is not publicly releasing details about their design and manufacture.

In the meantime, CrushPak® may still evolve further as the team works to produce a new design that will suit a host of other applications. The company aims to keep the core design the same but there will be changes in the size of the pack.

With its combination of highly-qualified personnel, innovative products, good design and careful product protection, Inveratek is a New Zealand company going places.