Acepak Sets Out Its End-Of-Line Machine Range for Fourth Quarter Planning

With South African food, beverage, dairy and pharmaceutical producers now shaping their fourth-quarter plans for 2026, Cape Town machine builder Acepak has laid out the complete range of end-of-line equipment it designs and supplies. Many local plants use September to decide exactly what they will run through the festive build-up, and Acepak is taking that moment to show buyers how its separate machine families connect, instead of leaving them to read one product page at a time. The company operates as a packaging machine manufacturer that designs, engineers, assembles and tests every unit inside South Africa, work it has carried out for roughly four decades.

One line, several machine families

End-of-line packaging is seldom the job of one machine. Once a product has been filled and labelled, it still needs collating, wrapping or casing, banding or sealing, and finally stacking and securing for the road. Acepak arranges its equipment into six areas that follow those steps: case packing, shrink wrapping, banding, pouch filling, palletising, and the integration that ties them together. Laying the range out this way is intended to ease the decision for a plant engineer who can tell the bottleneck sits somewhere past filling but is unsure which class of machine will clear it.

The layout mirrors the way sales actually happen. Producers rarely swap out a whole line at once. Usually one stage is choking throughput, and the answer is a single machine that must slot into the current layout without disturbing what runs before or after it. This is precisely why Acepak manufactures its own conveyors, tailoring them to the product and the floor space available rather than asking the plant to bend around a standard module.

Case packing and tray forming

Erectors, sealers and packers make up the case packing family. It runs from pneumatic and servo driven case and carton erectors and sealers, which raise and close cases without loading product automatically, to end loaded case packers that take product off infeed conveyors and push it into the case. For higher volumes there is the wrap around case packer, an inline unit that draws pre-scored cards in and times them to the arriving product. Rounding it out is a robotic case packer, which lifts product off the infeed with pneumatic or magnetic grippers and sets it into preformed cartons.

Tray formers and erectors run beside these. An automatic tray forming machine wraps pre-scored cards around collated product with a die press and fixes the folds using hot glue. Trays are still widespread in South African retail, especially for canned lines, dairy multipacks and shelf-ready displays, so a producer shifting between case and tray formats stays within one range. As a packing machine manufacturer, Acepak matches these units to the case sizes and pack patterns a customer already runs, which counts for a lot when a retailer, not the plant, has fixed the packaging specification.

Shrink wrapping across volume bands

Throughput is what separates the shrink wrapping options. At the entry level sits a sealer paired with a shrink tunnel for items that must be fully enclosed in film, plus a semi automatic shrink wrapper for lines that cannot justify full automation. The automatic tier brings an L-sealer, a cross infeed shrink wrapper fed from the side, a sleeve sealer and shrink tunnel, and an inline shrink wrapper with a lifter for product that needs raising into place. A flightbar shrink wrapper handles loose product in unsupported packs or on die-cut cardboard pads, grouping items with gated collation ahead of the seal. The top of the range is a high speed system that uses gated control to release set quantities and build packs from stored recipes.

The upshot of that breadth is that a beverage bottler running multipacks and a small food producer wrapping trays are never funnelled toward the same machine. Recipe led changeover earns its keep most where one line juggles several pack formats within a shift, a demand that keeps growing as retailers request more pack variations from a single producer.

Banding, pouch filling and palletising

For banding, Acepak offers the Bandall stand-alone modular banding machine, made for bundling jobs where a paper or film band is all that is needed to keep a pack together without full wrapping. Because it is built modularly, it accepts a broad set of configurations to suit product size and band placement.

Pouch formats have spread across food and household goods, and Acepak addresses three tiers of the job. Its automatic high volume pouch filler fills and seals blank stand-up pouches still open at the top, including designs with side-mounted spouts. The centre fitment pouch filler draws pouches from a magazine rail into a rotary turret for accurate filling. And a manual spout pouch filling and sealing system works from centre-folded film pulled off a roll, a fit for shorter runs and trial products.

Palletising closes out the line: robotic palletisers arrive as fully automated cells with pallet magazines, automatic feed conveyors, layer sheet inserters and product handling, while depalletisers use magnetic or pneumatic robotic heads to strip full pallets back down onto an accumulation table. Stretch wrapping spans a semi automatic machine, an automatic wrapper and a mobile robotic stretch wrapper that shifts between areas, handy in a warehouse where the wrapping points move with the season.

Integration and the parts most people forget

The integration group gathers the gear that links everything up: conveyors designed and built in house, spanning gravity roller conveyors and radius bends through to a spread of belt types; a stand-alone sleeve shrink tunnel for shrinking pre-applied sleeves or film around bundled or single products; a mechanical label and barcode applicator made for cases, outers and collated packs; and a pneumatically actuated trolley packer for inline automation. This is the equipment that determines whether a new machine genuinely lifts line output or just shunts the bottleneck a few metres down the floor.

Because the firm also acts as a packaging machine supplier rather than only a builder, it combines its own locally made units with equipment from established machine ranges wherever that serves the customer better, and it builds its robotic palletising cells around internationally recognised robotics suppliers. What results is a catalogue blending in-house engineering with proven third-party machines behind a single point of contact for the plant.

Who the range is built for

Beverage, food, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, and dairy are the core industries Acepak names, with an additional category for specialised packaging and processing needs that fall outside those groups. Each sector pulls in a different direction. Dairy runs cold and wet, pharmaceutical packing brings traceability and hygiene demands, beverage lives on speed, and food sits somewhere among the three. The company calls itself Africa’s leading robotics and secondary packaging equipment manufacturer, and the values it states turn on simplicity, customer focus, transparency and responsible manufacturing.

Support does not stop at installation

Any machine bought this quarter will be working through the busiest weeks of the year, which puts real weight on the support side. Acepak provides 24/7 technical support, preventative maintenance programmes, on-site and remote assistance, and operator training so plant staff can run and maintain the equipment on their own. Support lines sit in Cape Town and Johannesburg, backed by a national service manager as an escalation point. Offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban span the main South African industrial regions, while a United Kingdom office in Skelmersdale looks after customers in that market.

Producers considering an end-of-line upgrade before the year runs out can view the full machine range, industry pages and service details at https://acepak.com/.

About Acepak

Acepak is a family-owned South African manufacturer of end-of-line packaging machines and turnkey packaging systems, established around forty years ago. It designs, engineers, assembles and tests its equipment locally and ships machines to customers in more than 36 countries. The range takes in case packing, shrink wrapping, banding, pouch filling, palletising and line integration, and it serves the beverage, food, dairy, pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries. Acepak runs a head office in Montague Gardens, Cape Town, additional offices in Midrand and Pinetown, and an office in Skelmersdale in the United Kingdom, together with a service and support division covering maintenance, training and technical assistance.