By Kevin Webster
One lasting effect of the COVID-19 pandemic was a shift toward smaller, single-serve snack packaging to reduce the risk of virus transmission.
While the pandemic is now behind us, consumers continue to reach for single-serve snacks. According to a 2025 report from the Foodservice Packaging Institute, a trade association for the North American foodservice packaging industry, 56% of US adults use single-serve packaged products at least once a week. Although this figure is slightly down from 2021, the report suggests that demand for single-serve packaging will remain strong in the years ahead.
With this continued growth in single-serve snacks, food manufacturers have found success packaging multiple SKUs together, and one effective way to do that is with the flexibility of the VP-1 Variety Pack Cartoner from Bartelt.
The VP-1 Cartoner is a servo-driven, intermittent motion, horizontal end-load system designed to pack a variety of snack packages into a single carton. Depending on product and configuration, the VP-1 can achieve speeds of up to 40 cartons per minute.
A major American-based confectionery company recently purchased two VP-1s to support a product-line expansion. For this application, the company needed to pack different flavors of individually packaged snacks into a single carton.
The VP-1 is an ideal solution for variety packs of single-serve applications. It allows customers to select the number and combination of flavors that go into each carton. This level of flexibility, running multiple SKUs with different flavors in the same carton, gives users a competitive advantage and the ability to quickly pivot packaging needs change. Today, several dozen VP-1s are operating successfully in similar snack food packaging applications across the country.
The VP-1 is a highly flexible, reliable, and user-friendly solution that integrates seamlessly into both upstream and downstream automated or manual packaging lines. It also pairs well with Bartelt’s pouching solutions, offering customers a turnkey packaging solution from a single source.
Consumers have fully embraced single-serve variety snack packaging. Whether your operation is fully automated, largely manual, or somewhere in between, Bartelt has a cartoner to meet your needs.
Kevin Webster is a Regional Sales Manager for ProMach’s Flexible Packaging Group, which includes Matrix, Bartelt, and HMC Products. He can be reached at Kevin.Webster@ProMachBuilt.com.
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Bartelt is a trusted manufacturer of pouching and cartoning systems, providing dependable, long-lasting solutions for food and non-food industries. Bartelt also serves as the master distributor for FLtècnics’ rollstock pouch machines and Umbra Packaging’s large-format bagging systems. As the world’s first developer of intermittent-motion horizontal form fill seal pouching machines, Bartelt is a true pioneer in automated packaging.