Germany-headquartered Geka GmbH has opened a new filling line at its plant in Elgin, Illinois, effective July 1st, 2019. With this move, the company intends to significantly strengthen its presence in the American market. The line will be fully operational at the beginning of the third quarter of 2019.

“Geka’s Fully Finished business is in very high demand and it is key to streamline the development, production, and filling under one roof. Now, Geka Manufacturing Corp in Elgin, near Chicago, is offering this service to Geka’s American customers as well,” said the company in a release.

In practice, a fully automatic filling and capping machine with the latest technology was installed, offering a filling capacity of 15 million units per year. On July 1, 2019, the bottling plant has opened with a clean room, temperature and humidity controls, and a laboratory for product testing. “Geka Elgin relies on the same testing procedures as at then group’s headquarters in Bechhofen, Germany and trust on local partners for first-class formulations, that have been carefully screened by Geka’s experts in Germany. Geka cooperates with locally based qualified laboratories to guarantee highest quality,” added Geka.

This new investment in the USA will help Geka to better meet the needs of its customers who expect higher speed to market, quality, on time delivery and lower shipping costs.

In September last year, Geka had invested in hot-foil printing machines in its US plant. The equipment was installed to decorate complex, square bottles for lip gloss. The machine system has an inline image processing system which can fully check the print quality of the product.

“Geka Elgin offers a unique modular and flexible block building system with endless combination possibilities of bottles, caps and applicators/brushes for lip and eye units without the need of an investment for the customer. This standard portfolio has been expanded by a mini mascara packaging with only 2,5 ml filling volume to fit the travel size business,” added Geka. “Geka Elgin now offers full-service production in the areas of production, decoration and filling, including bottling. The advantage for Geka’s customers: a faster market launch through the optimized performance of applicators and standard tools. Customers are already showing great interest in the filling option and the first fully sourced and filled products by Elgin will be launched soon.”