ENGEL Prove to be a Bread Winner for Ravensbourn
Tuesday, 26 February 2019
Russell Meredith, Managing Director at Ravensbourn Ltd is passionate about his family business that was started by his parents, David and Monica in 1979.
During the 1980,s the company became known for their moulding of milk crates for most of the big name dairies. Following this success they entered the bread tray market, gaining contracts with the 2nd tier bakeries throughout the country.
Russell joined the team in 2008, when his parents decided to scale back on their involvement. With responsibility for sales his determination to make the company the number one moulder of basket, tray and nest containers in the UK continues to move ahead with unrelenting progress. Investment in tooling and premises has led to them becoming suppliers to a major UK supermarket chain of food grade PP stack and nest delivery containers. Ravensbourn have provided this one customer alone with in excess of 1.2 million units in the last year.
The company sits on a 53 acre site on the Derbyshire/Leicestershire border. It is the largest 24/7 manufacturing site in an area more commonly recognised for its distribution depots. Production scrap from the operation is granulated onsite and re-introduced into the moulding process. Any granulate unable to be utilised in this way, goes to a compounder to divert it away from landfill.
Between April and July of 2018 Ravensbourn took delivery of 7 ENGEL Duo 800 injection moulding machines and Viper linear automation. Russell Meredith comments “We had originally discounted the option of ENGEL moulding machines as the brands reputation for quality mistakenly led us to believe the investment required would be outside of our budget. However, a chance conversation between Mike Madden, ENGEL Area Sales Manager and my father, revealed that our preconceptions were inaccurate. Discussions followed between ourselves and ENGEL UK and I am pleased to say that we are now the proud owners of 7 very hard working ENGEL machines and robots.” /…
He continues “Polypropylene is an excellent material for the containers we supply. It is robust and 100% recyclable. People are quite often amazed when we tell them that one of our major customers maintains an operating pool of 12 million units. A surprising number go missing in action and continually need to be replaced.”
Nigel Baker, managing director of ENGEL UK says “The ENGEL Duo 800 was the ideal choice for Ravensbourn’s production. The short cycle times coupled with high levels of precision, ergonomics and efficiency make it very popular with our customers who mould large parts, highly sophisticated components for the automotive industry or high tech parts requiring a perfect surface.”
