Case study | August 2026

A frozen food logistics provider in Northern Europe operates a cold chain that starts at −18 °C in the cold room and finishes at retail. Their packaging bottleneck was the box erecting line inside the cold storage facility — where ice, condensation, and cold board made a legacy erector unreliable and expensive to run.

The Customer’s Pain Points

The provider erects 25,000–30,000 boxes per week for frozen vegetables, seafood, and ready meals, in single-wall B-flute cases (some with moisture-resistant coating). Problems in the cold environment:

• Icing and condensation. The legacy machine’s steel guides and folding shoes iced up between batches. Condensation on the pneumatic circuit caused erratic cylinder speeds and, in winter, frozen pilot lines.
• Cold, brittle board. Below 0 °C, board stiffness increases sharply and the crease becomes brittle. The legacy machine’s aggressive folding produced crease splits on 2–3% of blanks, weakening boxes that then fail in cold storage stacking.
• Slow, unreliable erecting. The machine ran at 55% of its rated speed because operators had to run it slow to reduce jams; effective output was 6–7 CPM.
• Downtime cost. Every erector stop stopped the whole cold chain line — product waiting on conveyors in a cold room costs money even when nothing is damaged.

The Solution: ZRAY Case Erector with Cold-Room Specification

ZRAY supplied a single-piece case erector with the cold-room specification, configured for the provider’s box sizes and the −18 °C environment:

1. Cold-Temperature Pneumatics

• Trace-heated air circuit: the main air line and pilot lines are trace-heated to keep the air above the dew point, eliminating ice in pilot valves and condensation in cylinders.
• Cold-rated pneumatic components with low-temperature seals rated to −30 °C, so cylinder speeds stay consistent at −18 °C.
• Automatic condensate drain on the air filter with a heater band, preventing freeze-up of the drain valve.

2. Cold-Board Folding Profiles

• Gentle folding force profiles with a slow ramp onto the crease, eliminating the crease splits that cold board suffers.
• Pre-tuned recipe for frozen-environment board — calibrated at −18 °C in ZRAY’s cold chamber test before delivery, not tuned in the field during production.
• Moisture-resistant board support: the machine runs coated (moisture-resistant) board with adjusted feed vacuum, preventing the coating from sticking to vacuum cups.

3. Icing-Resistant Construction

• Stainless and anodized guide surfaces that do not ice-bond to blanks.
• Sealed bearings throughout, with cold-rated grease.
• Insulated, heated control cabinet keeping the PLC above the dew point in the cold room.

Results and ROI

The provider measured 10 weeks before and 12 weeks after:

The Cold-Room Efficiency Story

The provider gained 20% line capacity without adding shifts or equipment. More importantly, the erecting line stopped being the weakest link in the cold chain: the new machine’s uptime means the cold room’s product flow no longer waits on boxes.

Annualized financial impact:

• Additional throughput (capacity monetized at provider’s margin): EUR 88,000/yr
• Reduced rework (crease-split boxes, repack in cold room): EUR 12,500/yr
• Reduced downtime labor and cold-room waiting time: EUR 9,000/yr
• Total: EUR 109,500/yr against a machine investment of EUR 74,000 — payback in 8.1 months.

ROI Summary Table

What the Operations Manager Said

“Everyone assumed slow, jam-prone erecting was normal in a cold room. It wasn’t — it was a design choice of the old machine. The cold-room specification changed the whole line.”

Lessons for Cold Storage Packaging

1. Specify the machine for the environment, not the average line. Cold-room erecting has specific failure modes — icing, cold-brittle board, condensation — that a standard machine simply does not handle.
2. Pre-tune recipes at operating temperature. Recipes calibrated in the field at ambient temperature will drift when the room is at −18 °C.
3. Protect the pneumatics first. Most cold-room erector failures are pneumatic: trace-heating the air circuit eliminates the largest failure class before it starts.

If your cold chain has a slow or unreliable erecting step, send us your room temperature, box sizes, and board grades — we will confirm the cold-room configuration that closes your gap. Request a cold-room specification review or message us on WhatsApp at +86 13681839278.