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Success Stories

At BW Packaging, we take pride in a job well done, a bag well-made, and a product well-handled. But we also know that your business is more than just "product"; it's the years of R&D that went into developing your offerings—whether that's frozen pasta that tastes like it's fresh-made, nutrition bars, pet food, or anything else. It's the people in your building, working to a shared vision.

Don't just take our word for it, though. Hear a few of our customers discuss how BW Packaging helped them find their packaging solutions. And when you're ready, let's talk about your packaging solution.

Thiele UltraStar Bag Filling - Pet Food - Elmira Pet Products

SUCCESS STORIESThiele UltraStar Bag Filling - Pet Food - Elmira Pet Products

Canada’s Largest Private Label Pet Food Manufacturer Steps Up to High-Speed Bagging

Elmira Pet Products, Canada’s largest private label dry pet food manufacturer, needed to add high-speed bagging capacity to keep pace with growing demand for its cat and dog food kibbles. The company turned to BW Packaging for the Thiele UltraStar Bag Filling System—a high-speed, double pick-and-fill bagger that represented a significant step up from the Thiele OmniStar systems Elmira had relied on for years. Installed in November 2016, the UltraStar immediately expanded the facility’s packaging throughput while maintaining the accuracy and reliability Elmira’s production environment demands. As a result of this investment, Elmira Pet

Products was able to:

  • Achieve bagging speeds of 20 to 27 bags per minute—a significant step up from its existing OmniStar systems—using the UltraStar’s double pick-and-fill design
  • Maintain strong fill accuracy across a range of bag sizes and kibble shapes using quad-scale weighing
  • Integrate inline metal detection with automatic off-grade rejection into the bagging line for food safety assurance
  • Add critical packaging capacity to support the company’s growth trajectory toward 110,000 metric tons of pet food per year

Growing Demand, Growing Expectations

Elmira Pet Products has been manufacturing pet food in Elmira, Ontario, since the early 1980s. What began as Martin Feed Mills in 1923—a grain supplier for local farmers—evolved through decades of ownership changes and strategic investments into Canada’s preeminent private label dry pet food operation. Today the company employs over 200 people, produces approximately 110,000 metric tons of cat and dog food per year, and ships to more than 35 countries. Its product portfolio spans the full spectrum, from price-sensitive formulas to premium holistic diets and veterinary therapeutic lines sold through mass merchandise, grocery, and pet specialty channels.

By 2016, Elmira Pet Products was deep into a multi-phase facility expansion that added new extruders, ingredient handling infrastructure, and production capacity. But new extrusion capacity is only useful if the packaging line can keep pace. As output grew, the company’s existing Thiele OmniStar baggers—reliable workhorses that had served the operation well for years—were approaching their throughput ceiling for the new volume targets.

Elmira needed a bagger that could handle large paper and poly bags of dry kibble at significantly higher speeds without sacrificing fill accuracy. The company had done a lot of work with Thiele over the years on large bag filling applications, and the relationship had established a foundation of trust and technical familiarity. When it was time to take the next step, the Thiele UltraStar was the natural answer.

Building on a Proven Relationship

The Thiele UltraStar installation wasn’t Elmira Pet Products’ first project with BW Packaging—it was the latest chapter in an ongoing equipment relationship. The company had been running Thiele OmniStar baggers in its facility for years, and the experience with those machines had given Elmira’s engineering team a deep familiarity with the Thiele platform, its controls architecture, and the level of support that comes with it.

Joe Samson, Plant Engineer at Elmira Pet Products, described the UltraStar as a big step up from the OmniStar systems already in place—not a departure from the platform, but an evolution of it. The core of the UltraStar’s speed advantage is its double pick-and-fill design. Where a conventional bag filler picks, opens, fills, and seals one bag at a time, the UltraStar stages two bags simultaneously. Both bags are picked from the magazine, both go into the fill station at the same time, and both are filled from the quad-scale weighing system overhead. That twin-lane architecture is what drives the 20-to-27 bags-per-minute throughput that Elmira needed.

The full line BW Packaging configured for Elmira included more than just the bagger. A Fortress inline metal detector with automatic off-grade rejection was integrated into the line upstream of the UltraStar, providing food safety assurance on every bag before it enters the filling process. Downstream, the sealed bags feed into Elmira’s palletizing process. The result is a complete, high-speed packaging line—from scale to pallet—designed as an integrated system.

Speed Where It Counts

The Thiele UltraStar has delivered exactly what Elmira Pet Products needed: a meaningful increase in packaging throughput on a platform they already know and trust.

20 to 27 Bags a Minute

The UltraStar’s double pick-and-fill architecture delivers 20 to 27 bags per minute at Elmira’s facility, depending on the size and shape of the bag being run. For a manufacturer producing 110,000 metric tons of dry pet food annually, that throughput directly supports the ability to keep pace with growing customer demand without adding shifts or lines. As Samson noted: time is money, and when you’re producing bags, you want to go as fast as you can.

Accuracy That Holds Up at Speed

Speed means nothing if every tenth bag is off-weight. The quad-scale weighing system integrated above the UltraStar fills both bags simultaneously with the precision that a private label manufacturer’s customers—and their consumers—expect. Samson described fill accuracy as strong and consistent across the range of kibble shapes and bag sizes Elmira runs on the system. For a company producing well-known retail brands across multiple channels, that consistency is what keeps customers coming back.

Integrated Food Safety

The Fortress inline metal detector with automatic off-grade rejection adds a critical food safety checkpoint to the line. Every bag passes through metal detection before entering the fill station, and any bag that triggers a detection event is automatically rejected without operator intervention. For a manufacturer serving mass merchandise, grocery, and pet specialty retailers across 35 countries, integrated food safety isn’t optional—it’s a requirement of doing business at scale.

A Partnership That Keeps Growing

The UltraStar installation in November 2016 was a milestone for Elmira Pet Products, but it was also a continuation of a longer story. The company had been working with Thiele equipment for years before the UltraStar arrived, and the relationship between the two teams had been built through real-world collaboration on large bag filling applications. When Elmira’s production demands outgrew the OmniStar, the next step up was a natural one—same brand, same support infrastructure, higher performance.

That kind of growth path—where a customer can scale from one Thiele platform to the next without starting from scratch—is a core part of the value BW Packaging brings to the pet food industry. The Thiele Star series, which now includes the re-engineered UltraStar G2, is designed so that the investment a company makes in training, integration, and process knowledge on one system carries forward to the next. For Elmira Pet Products, the UltraStar represents both a performance leap for today and a platform they can build on as their operation continues to grow. View the adjacent video to hear directly from Joe Samson at Elmira Pet Products about the Thiele UltraStar.

Click to play video