A Guide to Flow Wrapping (Horizontal Bagging)

Flow wrapping is used for packing solid items including biscuits, scratch cards and pharmaceuticals. If your business is looking to utilise flow wrapping for your products, this guide can help.

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In this guide

This guide will explain what flow wrapping is, highlight the best-suited products and answer frequently asked questions.

• What is flow wrapping?
• What type of product is flow wrapping suitable for?
• What will the bag look like?
• What benefits does flow wrapping offer?
• What materials are used?
• How does flow wrapping work?
• What quantities can you work with?
• How long does the process take?
• What are the expected costs?
• Flow wrapping vs shrink wrapping
• Flow wrap printing
• Why choose WePack?

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What is flow wrapping?

The product moves horizontally along a machine, then wrapped in film and sealed at either end by horizontal flow wrapping machines.

When your product is flow wrapped you end up with a similar bag to what is produced by a Vertical Form Fill Seal service. It will look something like this:

Flow wrapping is also called horizontal bagging, pillow-pouch wrapping, fin-seal wrapping and crimp-seal wrapping.

What type of product is flow wrapping suitable for?

Any solid item that can be pushed along a horizontal belt is suitable for flow wrapping. A chocolate bar, a pack of biscuits, a pack of tissues, a scratch card; any product that needs to be put into a bag that can ultimately be pushed.

Small granular items do not work for flow wrapping – vertical form fill seal is best for this kind of product.

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What will the bag look like?

Conventionally a bag produced by flow wrapping is rectangular, though square bags can also be created. The bag can be printed, clear or a single colour.

What benefits does flow wrapping offer?

Flow wrapping can preserve your raw material and offer protection.

Good flow wrapping restricts the packaging around the product so that it won’t move a lot in the package and be disturbed. The material used to seal the pack is also kept to a minimum so that the tails aren’t too long.

This means the pack can be neatly placed in outer packaging, reducing the number of resources needed and aiding transport.

Flow wrapping can also be combined with gas flushing. Gas flushing helps preserve your food by injecting a nitrogen mix into the pack. This displaces the oxygen in the bag.

What materials are used?

Just like vertical form fill seal, the packaging materials for a flow wrapper are made of either:

• polyethylene terephthalate (PET) - a common thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family, often used for containers of liquids and food.
• polyethylene (PE) - the most common plastic in use today. It has several key usages including plastic packaging.

Both are common types of plastic. They are strong, robust materials that keep products fresh.