MOSCOW (MRC) -- Linpac Packaging plans to open a production site in Belarus by the end of the year, according to FoodProductionDaily.
The Belarus facility will initially be 100% focussed on expandable polystyrene (EPS) because Russia mainly is an EPS market, said Linpac, who first considered building a factory in Belarus in 2009.
Speaking exclusively to FoodProductionDaily.com, Rene Christiansen, managing director and general manager for northwest Europe, said the the company had a contract for a new product relating to the bakery sector of "significant volume" and said it may be a "step change" fronted by the innovations teams in the UK and Germany but said he could not reveal more for the moment.
Speaking about the Belarus site, he said: "The cost to serve the Russian market out of the Poland is just too high, both from a transport but also from an import duty point of view.
"I don't think we’ll see EPS coming back from Belarus to, for instance Poland again, because of those import duties but it will cover Belarus itself and mainly Russia but also shipping into Ukraine and maybe even some of the Baltic countries."
We remind that, as MRC wrote previously, in line with its new ‘Fresh Thinking’ innovation strategy Linpac Packaging launched two new PP films for fresh meat, poultry and fish in 2012. Both films - LINtop PP HB Lock Seal and LINtop PP HB Peelable - are to be manufactured at the company’s Pontivy flexible films factory in France.
LINPAC Group Limited was founded in 1959 in Lincolnshire, England. It is now an international, GBP1.1 billion, mainly plastic packaging and supply chain manufacturing and services business, based in Birmingham, United Kingdom, and has 7,000 employees in 29 countries. The company manufactures food packaging, returnable transit packaging (RTP), rigid plastic containers, cartridges, bulk storage tanks, bulk containers, medical containers, spill control products, and GRP gratings and structures.
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