Located in the town of Baldissero d’Alba, about 50km south-east of Turin in northern Italy, Ondalba SpA is a family-owned company that has been producing corrugated packaging since 1954. With a constant commitment for innovation, together with the desire of its team and driven by the passion for creating excellent packaging, the company have become a leading-edge industrial group and that has three divisions, including: corrugated packaging; digital printing; honeycomb and ecopal.
“We believe in the strength of the group, in innovation, in reliability and speed,” says Junior Allasia, CEO of Ondalba SpA.
The headquarters is nestled in the province of Cuneo, and operates from an area of 150,000 sqm, of which 50,000 sqm is the factory. They produce over 150 tons per day of corrugated board and converted corrugated packaging. They have 80 employees, who produced a sales turnover of €70m in 2022. In addition to the headquarters in Baldissero, they also have two other factories dedicated to specialised production as follows:
- Ondacor S.r.l. located in Corneliano d’Alba produces corrugated board and honeycomb, cardboard tubes and ECOPAL recyclable pallets.
- Ondabat S.r.l. located in La Morra produces American style boxes, die-cut boxes, with printing up to six colours, specifically for small to medium print runs.
In terms of its customer base, around 70% of production serves the food and drinks industries; 18% is packaging for plastic materials, 10% is for mechanical industries and 2% for other sectors. Within the food and drink classification, 35% is wine, 25% fruit and vegetables, 30% confectionery and 10% for others. The customer base covers a radius of about 200 km from their facilities.
Best in Class
To keep its position as a leading supplier of high quality packaging, the privately owned business has always invested. “We believe in using state-of-the-art machinery, as it gives us the ability to service our customers with the best possible packaging,” says Allasia.
The plant list is quite impressive when it comes to converting and printing, including:
- TCY four colour N8 1630 FFG (to be installed May 2024)
- MHI four colour EVOL (2022)
- BOBST six colour Masterflex with Expertcut (2022)
- Göpfert four colour RDC 1620 (2020)
- BOBST four colour FFG 618 (2020)
- HP 15500 digital press six colours and varnish (2020)
- Göpfert five colour (with varnish) Evolution RDC (2018)
- BOBST 8.20 Expertline (2017)
- BOBST four colour DRO 1628 (2008)
New Corrugator Chosen
For many decades, the company has been running Agnati equipment, as they are located only 200km south west of the Vimercate manufacturing facility of the former Agnati business. “We always had a nice relationship with Agnati, for many years,” says Allasia. “When they became Quantum and part of the Fosber Group, we continued our relationship. When we approached them to explain we needed to increase corrugated output, we decided to look at the S/Line machine in detail.”
Looking to replace the 2,050mm Agnati line, Ondalba and Fosber worked on a project that would see the installation of new 2.8m S/Line 420 corrugator with all the main industry 4.0 features. Including services, corrugator and handling, the project totalled €12m and started in February 2022; the new machine was fully commissioned in May 2023.
“This new S/Line is already showing us its massive potential,” says Allasia. “Obviously, it has far more production capacity compared to the previous Agnati, which will allow for the continued growth of our business. It has many interesting features, and we are impressed by the high levels of automation and our operators find the remote assistance to be of great value.”
He continues, “We wanted to take a phased approach to the project, installing individual units one at a time, so that we could continue production. Overall, the installation process ran pretty smoothly and we have been hugely satisfied with the level and quality of the training and ongoing technical support.”
Great Prospects
“The addition of this new Fosber S/Line is giving us a lot more top quality board already,” adds Allasia. “Of course, the investment in the EVOL and the Göpfert helps to utilise this new capacity and we installed those machines, building up the order book knowing we would add a new corrugator in 2022/23. Things are certainly moving in the right direction, even if the market is a little stagnant at the moment.”
He concludes, “This was a pretty significant project for a company of our size. Working with the Fosber team helped ensure we were able to implement the project on our agreed timeline, and our team worked nicely with the team from Fosber to effect a great start-up. Looking to the next stages of our development, we are now looking at an automatic warehousing system to store sheets and finished goods, as the output of the new Fosber is so large, we can afford to store palletised loads, giving our customers the perfect ‘Just in Time’ delivery that they have come to expect from us.”
