Sidel is a manufacturing company providing equipment and services for packaging
liquids
A liquid is a nearly incompressible fluid that conforms to the shape of its container but retains a (nearly) constant volume independent of pressure. As such, it is one of the four fundamental states of matter (the others being solid, gas, a ...
such as
water
Water (chemical formula ) is an inorganic, transparent, tasteless, odorless, and nearly colorless chemical substance, which is the main constituent of Earth's hydrosphere and the fluids of all known living organisms (in which it acts as a ...
;
carbonated
Carbonation is the chemical reaction of carbon dioxide to give carbonates, bicarbonates, and carbonic acid. In chemistry, the term is sometimes used in place of carboxylation, which refers to the formation of carboxylic acids.
In inorganic ch ...
and non-carbonated soft drinks; sensitive beverages such as
milk
Milk is a white liquid food produced by the mammary glands of mammals. It is the primary source of nutrition for young mammals (including breastfed human infants) before they are able to digestion, digest solid food. Immune factors and immune ...
,
liquid dairy products,
juices
Juice is a drink made from the extraction or pressing of the natural liquid contained in fruit and vegetables. It can also refer to liquids that are flavored with concentrate or other biological food sources, such as meat or seafood, such as ...
,
tea
Tea is an aromatic beverage prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured or fresh leaves of ''Camellia sinensis'', an evergreen shrub native to East Asia which probably originated in the borderlands of southwestern China and north ...
,
coffee
Coffee is a drink prepared from roasted coffee beans. Darkly colored, bitter, and slightly acidic, coffee has a stimulant, stimulating effect on humans, primarily due to its caffeine content. It is the most popular hot drink in the world.
S ...
,
isotonics and
beer
Beer is one of the oldest and the most widely consumed type of alcoholic drink in the world, and the third most popular drink overall after water and tea. It is produced by the brewing and fermentation of starches, mainly derived from ce ...
;
food
Food is any substance consumed by an organism for nutritional support. Food is usually of plant, animal, or fungal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is inge ...
and home and
personal care
Personal care or toiletries are consumer products used in personal hygiene, personal grooming or for beautification.
Products
Personal care includes products as diverse as cleansing pads, colognes, cotton swabs, cotton pads, deodorant, eye lin ...
.
Sidel manufactures and services equipment that enables other companies to package such liquids using
PET
A pet, or companion animal, is an animal kept primarily for a person's company or entertainment rather than as a working animal, livestock, or a laboratory animal. Popular pets are often considered to have attractive appearances, intelligence ...
,
can,
glass
Glass is a non-crystalline, often transparent, amorphous solid that has widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in, for example, window panes, tableware, and optics. Glass is most often formed by rapid cooling (quenching) of ...
and other materials. It specialises in manufacturing
blow-moulding for production of PET bottles, plus fillers, labellers, pasteurisers, bottle and crate washer, packers, craters, and
palletizer
A palletizer or palletiser is a machine which provides automatic means for stacking cases of goods or products onto a pallet.
Manually placing boxes on pallets can be time consuming and expensive; it can also put unusual stress on workers. The f ...
s machines.
The company has 50 offices and 5,487 employees, nine research centres and over 40,000 machines installed in more than 190 countries (2018).
In 2003, Sidel joined
Tetra Laval Group, a multinational corporation of Swedish origin, which is active in liquid food packages and packaging. The Tetra Laval group is divided into three divisions:
DeLaval
Delaval is the surname of a family of gentry/aristocracy in Northumberland, England, from the 11th century to the 19th century. Their main estate was the manor of Seaton Delaval. The 18th century Delavals are noteworthy for their colourful life ...
,
Tetra Pak
Tetra Pak is a Swedish–Swiss multinational food packaging and processing company with head offices in Lund, Sweden, and Pully, Switzerland. The company offers packaging, filling machines and processing for dairy, beverages, cheese, ice cream ...
and Sidel.
History
Since its foundation in 1965 in Le Havre, France, Sidel has been developing packaging technologies for the beverage industry. In 1961 the company developed the first plastic bottle made of polyvinyl chloride (
PVC) as a container for edible oil and, later on, wine, milk and water. In 1973 Sidel released the first plastic HDPE (high-density polyethylene) bottle for milk, sterilised by ultra-heat treatment (
UHT
Ultra-high temperature processing (UHT), ultra-heat treatment, or ultra-pasteurization is a food processing technology that sterilizes liquid food by heating it above – the temperature required to kill bacterial endospores – for 2 ...
). In 1980 Sidel delivered its first
PET
A pet, or companion animal, is an animal kept primarily for a person's company or entertainment rather than as a working animal, livestock, or a laboratory animal. Popular pets are often considered to have attractive appearances, intelligence ...
blow moulding machine to the family-owned soft-drink company Barraclough in Great Britain. Sidel's first international subsidiary opened in 1984 in
Atlanta
Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,715 ...
, USA. In the same year, Sidel also sold the first high-speed PET blow moulding machine. In the 1990s Sidel acquired the French companies Hema (1995),
Cermex (1996) and Gebo (1997). In 1997 Sidel introduced a system which combines blow moulding, filling and capping. In the same year, the first Sidel dry preforms decontamination by H
2O
2 spray was launched with the Combi Disis. The development of an internal carbon-based coating in 1999 strengthened the barrier properties of PET packages to gases (O
2 and CO
2) and made PET-bottles usable for beer. In 2003 Sidel joined
Tetra Laval
Tetra Laval is a Swiss-domiciled multinational corporation of Swedish origin, with headquarters in Pully, Switzerland. The Tetra Laval Group provides packaging, processing and distribution products for a range of foodstuffs, including liquids, fru ...
and merged with the Italian company Simonazzi in 2005. Simonazzi was founded in 1850 and had its headquarters in
Parma
Parma (; egl, Pärma, ) is a city in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna known for its architecture, Giuseppe Verdi, music, art, prosciutto (ham), Parmigiano-Reggiano, cheese and surrounding countryside. With a population of 198,292 ...
, Italy. In April 2013, Sidel announced the launch of a new company as part of the Sidel Group,
Gebo Cermex. Gebo Cermex focuses on engineering, line integration and end-of-line packaging. A partnership with Kortec was communicated in October 2013. The target of the co-operation is to develop new light-blocking PET milk bottles. In March 2014, the divestment of Swedish subsidiary, Tectubes, was announced.
Acquisition by Tetra Laval
The
European Commission
The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...
's
Merger Task Force initially opposed the acquisition by Tetra Laval of Sidel, then valued at 1.7 billion euros. The Commission's opposition was eventually struck down in 2005 by the
European Court of Justice
The European Court of Justice (ECJ, french: Cour de Justice européenne), formally just the Court of Justice, is the supreme court of the European Union in matters of European Union law. As a part of the Court of Justice of the European Un ...
, in a case that has become a landmark of
European Union competition law
European competition law is the competition law in use within the European Union. It promotes the maintenance of competition within the European Single Market by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies to ensure that they do not crea ...
.
Fields of activity
Liquid filling
Sidel covers the entire process chain for liquid filling. The portfolio includes complete line solutions, including standalone equipment such as
blow moulders, fillers, labellers and associated services. The aseptic filling lines comprise wet sterilisation technology and dry preform sterilisation using hydrogen peroxide. The single packaging functions can also be fitted to a combined line.
Packaging design
Another field of activity is the
packaging design
Packaging is the science, art and technology of enclosing or protecting products for distribution, storage, sale, and use. Packaging also refers to the process of designing, evaluating, and producing packages. Packaging can be described as a co ...
of
PET
A pet, or companion animal, is an animal kept primarily for a person's company or entertainment rather than as a working animal, livestock, or a laboratory animal. Popular pets are often considered to have attractive appearances, intelligence ...
bottles. In addition to the development of different shapes and sizes, this includes flexible moulding technologies as well as convenience aspects concerning the handling of large PET-containers or light weighting and logistical aspects such as better storing solutions.
Equipment training and maintenance
Sidel runs seven training facilities in France, Italy, Mexico,
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
, United States,
Malaysia
Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federation, federal constitutional monarchy consists of States and federal territories of Malaysia, thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two r ...
and China. They offer seminars and technical trainings in different sectors such as filling technologies, maintenance and product applications. The company also took part in the European project "SKILLS, Multimodal Interfaces for Capturing and Transfer of Skills", funded by the European Framework Programme IST FP6. Sidel's contribution to the five-year project phase was to test and develop virtual and augmented reality platforms for industrial training. The company has also developed individual, customer-orientated on-the-job training and offers maintenance services on-site.
[From hotfill to aseptic: Soft Drinks International, May 2012, p.58-59]
References
{{Authority control
Packaging companies of Italy
Industrial design firms
Containers