Cape Town packaging equipment builder Acepak has set out the full spread of machines it makes and supplies for the end of a production line, as South African food, beverage, dairy and pharmaceutical producers move into their fourth quarter planning for 2026. September is the month when many local plants lock in what they will run through the festive build-up, and the company is using that window to show buyers how the individual machine families fit together rather than presenting them one product page at a time. Acepak works as a packaging machine manufacturer that designs, engineers, assembles and tests its equipment in South Africa, and it has been doing that work for around forty years.

One line, several machine families

The end of a packaging line is rarely a single machine. A product that has already been filled and labelled still has to be collated, wrapped or cased, banded or sealed, then stacked and secured for transport. Acepak groups its offering into six areas that map onto those stages: case packing, shrink wrapping, banding, pouch filling, palletising, and the integration work that joins them. Presenting the range this way is meant to make the buying decision simpler for a plant engineer who knows the bottleneck is somewhere after filling but is not certain which machine class solves it.

That structure also reflects how the company sells. A producer seldom replaces an entire line in one go. More often a single stage is holding back throughput, and the fix is one machine that has to drop into an existing layout without forcing changes upstream or downstream. Acepak builds conveyors in house for exactly that reason, matching them to product specification and available floor space rather than expecting the plant to work around a standard module.

Case packing and tray forming

The case packing family covers erectors, sealers and packers. It includes pneumatic and servo operated case and carton erectors and sealers, which erect and seal cases without automatic product loading, and end loaded case packers where products arrive on infeed conveyors and are pushed into the case. Higher volume operations are served by the wrap around case packer, an inline system that feeds pre-scored cards into the machine and synchronises them with incoming product. There is also a robotic case packer that uses pneumatic or magnetic grippers to lift product off the infeed and place it into preformed cartons.

Tray formers and erectors sit alongside these. The automatic tray forming machine folds pre-scored cards around collated product using a die press, with hot glue applied to hold the folds. Trays remain common in South African retail, particularly for canned goods, dairy multipacks and shelf-ready presentations, so a producer moving between case and tray formats has options inside the same range. As a packing machine manufacturer, Acepak builds these units to suit the case sizes and pack patterns a customer already runs, which matters when the packaging specification is fixed by a retailer rather than by the plant.

Shrink wrapping across volume bands

Shrink wrapping is split by throughput. At the manual end there is a sealer with a shrink tunnel for items that need to be fully enclosed in film, and a semi automatic shrink wrapper for operations that do not justify a fully automatic line. The automatic range includes an L-sealer, a cross infeed shrink wrapper with a side product feed, sleeve sealer and shrink tunnel, and an inline shrink wrapper with a lifter for products that need to be raised into position. A shrink wrapper with a flightbar handles loose product in unsupported packs or onto die-cut cardboard pads, using gated collation to group items before sealing. For the highest volumes there is a high speed system that uses gated control to release a set quantity of product and form packs from stored recipes.

The practical point of that spread is that a beverage bottler running multipacks and a small food producer wrapping trays are not pushed towards the same machine. Recipe driven changeover matters most where a single line handles several pack formats in a shift, which is increasingly normal as retailers ask for more pack variations from the same producer.

Banding, pouch filling and palletising

Banding is covered by the Bandall stand-alone modular banding machine, built for bundling applications where a paper or film band is enough to hold a pack together without full wrapping. Its modular construction allows for a wide set of configurations depending on product size and band placement.

Pouch filling has grown as a format across food and household goods, and Acepak covers three levels of it. The automatic high volume pouch filler fills and seals blank stand-up pouches that have not yet been sealed at the top, including formats with side-mounted spouts. The centre fitment pouch filler loads pouches from a magazine rail into a rotary turret for precise filling. A manual spout pouch filling and sealing system uses centre-folded film drawn from a roll, which suits smaller runs and trial products.

At the end of the line, palletising covers robotic palletisers built as fully automated cells with pallet magazines, automatic feed conveyors, layer sheet inserters and product handling, alongside depalletisers with magnetic or pneumatic robotic heads for stripping full pallets back onto an accumulation table. Stretch wrapping runs from a semi automatic machine through to an automatic wrapper and a mobile robotic stretch wrapper that can be moved between areas, which is useful in a warehouse where wrapping points shift with the season.

Integration and the parts most people forget

The integration category takes in the equipment that connects everything: conveyors designed and manufactured in house, from gravity-driven roller conveyors and radius bends through to a range of belt types; a stand-alone sleeve shrink tunnel for shrinking pre-applied sleeves or film around bundled or individual products; a mechanical label and barcode applicator built for cases, outers and collated packs; and a pneumatically actuated trolley packer for inline automation. These are the items that decide whether a new machine actually raises line output or simply moves the bottleneck a few metres along.

Acting as a packaging machine supplier as well as a builder, the company pairs its own locally built units with equipment from established machine ranges where that is the better answer for a customer, and its robotic palletising cells are built around internationally recognised robotics suppliers. The result is a catalogue that mixes in-house engineering with proven third-party machines under one point of contact for the plant.

Who the range is built for

Acepak lists beverage, food, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, and dairy as its main industries, with a further category for specialised packaging and processing requirements that do not fit those groupings. Those sectors have different priorities. Dairy runs cold and wet, pharmaceutical packing carries traceability and hygiene requirements, beverage is driven by speed, and food sits somewhere between all three. The company describes itself as Africa's leading robotics and secondary packaging equipment manufacturer, and its stated values centre on simplicity, customer focus, transparency and responsible manufacturing.

Support does not stop at installation

Machines bought this quarter will be running through the busiest weeks of the year, so the support side carries weight. Acepak offers 24/7 technical support, preventative maintenance programmes, on-site and remote assistance, and operator training so that plant staff can run and maintain the equipment themselves. Support lines are held in Cape Town and Johannesburg, with a national service manager available as an escalation point. Offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban cover the main South African industrial regions, and a United Kingdom office in Skelmersdale supports customers in that market.

Producers weighing up an end-of-line upgrade before the year closes can see the full machine range, industry pages and service details at https://acepak.com/.

About Acepak

Acepak is a family-owned South African manufacturer of end-of-line packaging machines and turnkey packaging systems, founded around forty years ago. The company designs, engineers, assembles and tests its equipment locally and supplies machines to customers in more than 36 countries. Its range covers case packing, shrink wrapping, banding, pouch filling, palletising and line integration, serving the beverage, food, dairy, pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries. Acepak has a head office in Montague Gardens, Cape Town, further offices in Midrand and Pinetown, and an office in Skelmersdale in the United Kingdom, along with a service and support division covering maintenance, training and technical assistance.

Media Contact

Acepak
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +27 21 552 5999
Website: https://acepak.com/