Farmavita

With thirty years of experience creating high quality professional hair products from its full cycle industrial complex near Milan, family-owned hair cosmetics manufacturer, Farmavita, dedicates its full effort to ensure that their containers have the ideal look and feel. 

Now operating in forty countries, Farmavita chose Sidel’s EvoBLOW solution to maximise the integrity and quality of its 1L white PET bottles within the limited space constraints of its existing manufacturing line.

Manuel Ferrarotti, Chief Operating Officer at Farmavita, commented: “Our goal was to implement PET across a wide range of products traditionally packaged in HDPE, paving the way for more sustainable solutions. By leveraging PET’s lower blowing temperatures, we aimed to lower both our carbon footprint and energy consumption. Additionally, by developing in-house PET blow moulding capabilities, we wanted to simplify our logistics, reduce packaging storage needs, and improve overall operational efficiency.” 

“The products specifically selected contain hydrogen peroxide, which, under certain transport and storage conditions, can lead to an increase of the internal pressure and deform the base of standard HDPE bottles. The look and feel of our packaging isn’t just important – it’s essential to how customers experience our brand.”

Addressing colour requirement and material distribution 

To create a clean, impactful look and feel for its 1L bottles that remains consistent from production through to store shelves, Farmavita uses preforms with TIO2 white colourant – a food additive valued for its colouring and opacifying properties. 

This leads to two significant challenges in the manufacturing process. Firstly, the TIO2 additive makes the preform harder to blow, requiring more heating time. Secondly, the bottle must have equal resistance across its whole surface, especially at the base, to withstand the internal pressure due to the potential reactions of hydrogen peroxide that can occur due to high summer temperatures.

Blowing excellence with improved heating and stretching

By partnering with Sidel, Farmavita was able to benefit from the leading packaging manufacturer’s five decades of expertise in blowing all types of PET resins, including virgin and recycled PET (rPET), one-way and refillable PET, as well as transparent, opaque, monolayer, and multilayer bottles. Farmavita chose Sidel’s EvoBLOW regular SBO 6 with a production output of 7200 bottles per hour in the 1L format. 

Farmavita took advantage of the EvoBLOW modularity to customise the oven with two additional heating modules, increasing the preform heating time while reducing the temperature.
The result is a better material stretching and distribution when processing the TIO2 preforms while also reducing the required ventilation, leading to a 10% decrease in energy consumption. The oven is also equipped with an Air Recovery system which also cuts air consumption by 30%.

Even though the two extra heating modules have increased the oven length, Sidel’s experts managed to deliver an optimised machine layout by integrating a compact, customised preform feeder. This allowed the complete blower installation to fit within a highly limited space—without compromising overall output. The infeed rail was also adapted to accommodate the very small preform neck ring.

New bottle base to improve resistance to Hydrogen Peroxide

The dedicated bottle base provided by Sidel features a more structured design which no longer risks the bottle collapsing or deformation, and results in a more stable and appealing bottle on the line and the shelves. 

Before installing the blower at Farmavita’s plant, Sidel experts held dedicated packaging process sessions at their Packaging Excellence Centre in France. These focused on production feasibility tests to define the optimal blowing process and ensure top bottle performance—despite the challenges posed by the preform’s bi-orientation rates. This approach enabled early qualification of the bottle specifications and accelerated the start of industrial production at the customer’s site.

Ferrarotti concludes: “By partnering with leading packaging experts at Sidel, we were able to create a bespoke solution that addressed our coloured PET and material distribution requirements, resulting in a much higher quality bottle with an elevated ‘look and feel’ that our customers will appreciate. In the future, we are considering integrating additional formats, such as 100ml bottles, rather than relying on an external converter, which would also reduce our packaging and transport costs.”