Harpak-Ulma starts new tray sealing platform

Harpak-ULMA announced a new application of the Mondini Trave Sinfonia tray-sealing platform designed explicitly for high-volume ground-meat production. The solution delivers a higher-output, fully automated alternative to conventional tray-sealing methods — setting a new performance benchmark for producers.

Sinfonia can effectively double throughput compared to typical mechanical grind-line tray sealers, increasing output from roughly 120 packs per minute to as high as 200 packs per minute.

Sinfonia's software-controlled magnetic-transport architecture delivers this dramatic performance advantage by moving trays on independent shuttles with micron-level accuracy. The innovative design eliminates belts, pusher arms, and other friction-based components that typically constrain sealing speed, especially in low-oxygen MAP applications.

Although the Sinfonia system was introduced in 2023, this marks its first application for grind-line environments, where tray control, contamination, and mechanical indexing have long limited achievable speeds.

"The competitive ceiling for grind-line tray sealing is around 120 ppm. With Sinfonia, we can engineer a 200-ppm grind line—almost a 100% throughput increase," said Carlo Bergonzi, Product Manager, Tray Sealing at Harpak-ULMA. "Sinfonia fundamentally changes what's possible in ground-meat tray-sealed packaging," he added. "By controlling each tray independently, we remove the mechanical constraints that typically dictate line speed. The result is a faster, cleaner, and far more stable tray-sealing process that simply isn't achievable with conventional systems. Given the momentum behind meat-brick formats across major retailers, this application directly addresses the performance conversations we’re hearing from processors as they head into IPPE 2026.”