I'm that guy...
Meet the guy who made your potato chip bag so hard to open. A manufacturing engineer challenged with a not-so-simple problem, a pretty nifty solution, and today we have lots of spilled chips.
“I’m that guy. The guy that everyone hates. The guy who made it so difficult to open your bag of potato chips.
It was my first job right out of school. I was working for Hercules Chemical, a company that no longer exists although you have to blame that on some one else. I was in the Packaging Films Group, making multilayer polypropylene films for food packaging. The film had a heat-seal adhesive on one side of the polypropylene base. One of our larger clients used our films to make potato chip bags.”
Check out the full tale here. Also be sure to see this slo-mo video of the chip-filling machine he describes (which is more complicated than you’d imagine, but for good reason). How else do you turn a sheet of plastic-coated foil into chip bags in mere seconds while precisely filling each one to within a percent of the target weight?
That Guy you’ve always hated now has a name…
