Packaging Innovation

Stewart Armstrong his career in packaging at Hershey Foods over 40 years ago, upon graduating with a BSIE from West Virginia University. Experience in the chocolate and confectionary industry led him to Carnation Company where he gained more experience in handling powdered products, food service automation, and high-speed pouch lines. Assigned to the New Ventures Production Team, he was part of the group that developed a capital forgiveness model to fast-track new products and packages to market. This bypasses the typical delays encountered in capital approval processes. When Nestlé acquired Carnation, the New Ventures Production Team became part of the integration of combined the organizations, introducing Stew to numerous products and packaging operations in Europe. During this time, he gained new and different perspectives in packaging.

Heat and Control, Inc. hired Stewart to build the Packaging Systems Engineering Department separate from their Process Engineering Department. The department, under his leadership integrated Ishida combination weighers into complete packaging systems. This led to developing can fillers and shuttle thermoform depositors that qualified Heat and Control to become a member of the PMMI. During this time, Stewart gained considerable exposure to the snack, IQF, meat and poultry, pasta, and consumer products industries.

Raymond Automation, the sales organization for SIG (now Syntegon Technology, GmbH) selected Stew to create an engineering department, supporting sales and machinery re-deployment operations. At that time, Raymond Automation represented several other companies including Fette, Hassia, and Volpak. They supplied automated primary and secondary packaging systems to the biscuit, coffee, confectionary, dairy, pharmaceutical and other industries.

Stew returned to the food industry when he joined Kraft Foods R&D as a packaging equipment development engineer. There he worked on global automation projects in all of their business sectors. He specialized in new product development and robotic flexible automation.  He was named on two patents.  His work included biscuit, confectionary, dry packaged deserts, Lunchables™, Handisnacks™, and many other products.  He championed flexible component assembly and retail ready packaging during his tenure at Kraft.

Great Lakes Cheese, Co. Inc. appointed Stew as their packaging engineering manager.  He introduced emerging and next generation packaging machinery to increase throughput and improve productivity. This included traditional and robotic automation for primary and secondary packaging. Stewart initiated necessary changes that address the challenges of retail ready packaging for GLC.  Under his guidance numerous improvements were made to packaging materials.  While there, GLC introduced many new packaging innovations and products including the cracker cut tray.