Southbound
Introduction
Caution: This Romantic Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa, Consensual,
Desc: Romantic Sex Story: Introduction - There are surprises and then there are SURPRISES. Andy Andrews got both, one on top of the other. It's funny how that happens.
A few words of explanation are in order. I spent over thirty years in the packaging industry, beginning with corrugated containers and moving into flexible packaging. Flexible packaging is any package that is constructed from flexible stock, be it film (for instance, a package of potato chips), paper (for instance the outer wrap of single toilet tissue rolls), or foil (for instance, the lid of a single-serving yogurt container).
Converting (or a convertor) is a generic term for taking film, paper or foil roll stock (also called web), and converting it into the packaging for some product. This might be done by printing on it, laminating pieces of flexible stock together, or turning the stock into a bag or pouch. Laminating is taking two or more substrates (pieces of web -- it could be different types of web) and bonding them together to create a material with a specific set of attributes that could provide strength, moisture barrier, gas barrier, or better appearance.
If the laminate includes an outer clear film, it can be reverse printed on the inside of the clear film to trap the printing, and protect the printing from the package contents or anything that happens to the outside of the package.
Printing technology has developed to the point where you can get magazine quality reproduction on flexible packages via the "process printing" method.
The packaging manufacturing company, or "converter", makes packages from the original flexible stock. That is its business. It does not make the product that fits into the package, nor does it fill the package with the contents. Its business is the manufacture of the package itself.
The finished rolls (or bags/pouches) are shipped to companies who produce the contents and have the machines that convert these webs into filled packages that you find in your stores. When a flexible packaging company talks about being in the dried fruit or coffee or cereal business, it means they are dedicated to manufacturing packaging materials designed for those industries.
While a converter company does not fill the packages, nor does it make the machines that fill packages, it needs to know a lot about the filling machines. The reason is that the package shapes, sizes, and tolerances depend on how the filling machine works.
There are literally hundreds of examples of these types of packages on your supermarket shelves. I hope some of the technical terms in this story don't distract from your enjoyment of it.