The year that was 2023

21 December 2023

By Karen Sherman, General Manager

2023 has been a year of many changes for Manupackaging, with us seeing them happen locally, nationally and internationally.

Locally, our UK site made significant progress in our “under one roof” project – with the goal of bringing more stretch film conversion facilities to the UK and make Manunature films more available to our customers, being able to meet greater demand more quickly while remaining cost-effective.

The start of the process back in May saw the decommission of our bubble production line – a staple of Manupackaging UK ever since 1997; staff gathered to see Andrew Short personally offload the last ever roll of bubble produced at our site in Corsham.

With the support of Group, we invested in fully refurbishing our primary production unit, not only to accommodate new production lines and machinery, but to create a more welcoming experience as we aim to invite and welcome more visitors to our site to see first-hand just how much we are doing to make our products more sustainable and to better educate customers on their usage. The renovation work is ongoing, while we remain fully operational with an expected completion date of early 2024.

Our customers have also been introduced to new faces and voices in our Customer Service and Sales teams throughout the year. First, we welcomed Barry Nelson as a Business Development Manager, who has been exceptional in bringing new business to Manupackaging UK; then throughout the year, we also welcomed Duncan De Jager, Charlie Jennings and Sarah Middleton, who have all fitted into our team seamlessly!

Behind the scenes we are also saying farewell to Lionel Chandler, who after 15 years with us is retiring at Christmas. Lionel started as a bubble line operative before moving on to desk-based roles, and finally as our caretaker he has had a passion for ensuring everything looked neat and pristine! We wish him all the best, but that leaves us the question of…. Who’s going to cut the grass?!

Nationally, the UK site is now fully owned by Group; this means that we are more able to focus our operations and goals in line with the Group vision to further broaden our customer offering, and make even bigger steps towards helping customers meet their sustainability goals, as well as us meeting our own.

The biggest step we have taken is rolling out our “Close The Loop” scheme, where we work hand-in-hand with our customers to recover used stretch film in order to include it in the manufacture of new film with improved quality recycled content; this not reduces costs to our customers, CO2 emissions and plastic to landfill, but this scheme will prepare us and our customers for any future progression of Plastic Packaging Tax and greater ongoing PCR material demand.

Internationally, our primary production site in Germany launched the M-Forum back in September with a day focused on welcoming Manupackaging representatives from across Europe including myself, our Operations Manager Holly and Barry (in his first visit to Germany with us) – this hybrid showroom has been developed as a learning experience to better engage with customers, by allowing them to visit and be better informed about our products and services through live seminars, product demonstrations and testing. The M-Forum also hosts virtual capabilities where visitors can join us online from across the world in webinars that are run regularly. I was also pleased to go back earlier this month to welcome and meet one of our key customers to the M-Forum in person to discuss the potential of working with Manupackaging UK to further build on their sustainability goals.

I feel the changes we have made in 2023 gives us the platform to build better working relationships with our customers, and that 2024 has the potential to be one of o