The Requirements Are Different From Food Packaging

Medical and laboratory packaging is judged on three things food packaging is not: dimensional repeatability tight enough for automated filling lines, no particle shedding that could contaminate a sample, and material traceability. A tray that holds twenty vials must position each one within a fraction of a millimetre, cycle after cycle, or the filling head misses.

Shantou Longsheng Industry Co., Ltd. builds multi-station thermoforming machines and vacuum forming machines that produce this class of packaging, together with in-house precision molds. The company was founded in 1998 in Shantou City, Guangdong Province, and holds 25 authorised patents.

Typical Diagnostic and Laboratory Formats

• Vial trays for injectable and reagent bottles, with individual nests and a finger lift at each position
• Blood collection tube trays sized to standard 13mm and 16mm tube diameters
• Reagent card and test strip trays with locating ribs
• Blister trays for capsules and tablets used as inner packaging
• Trays for single-use surgical instruments and procedure kits
• Sampling and specimen cups for collection and transport
• Protective clamshells for thermometers and small devices

Material Selection

PETG is common for medical trays because it is clear, tough and tolerates gamma or ETO sterilisation routes used for many devices. PET offers clarity and stiffness at lower cost for non-sterile diagnostic kits. PS gives crisp dimensional definition for high-cavity-count trays. PP is chosen where autoclave resistance or chemical resistance to reagents is needed. All four run on Longsheng machines, alongside HIPS, PVC, PLA, PE and biodegradable sheet.

Tooling Is Where the Precision Comes From

A medical tray with 40 cavities is a toolmaking problem before it is a machine problem. Cavity-to-cavity consistency depends on uniform heating across the full sheet width, a rigid mold with temperature control in both halves, and a punching station that trims without stressing the part. Longsheng manufactures molds in-house, which means the forming machine, the mold and the trimming die are designed as one system — the reason a validated tray can be reproduced identically on a second machine years later.

Cleanliness and Handling

Because these trays are often packed in cleanroom-adjacent areas, downstream handling matters as much as forming. Automatic stacking with controlled count reduces manual contact, and trimmed edges are clean rather than fibrous. Where an application requires it, trays can be formed without lubricant residue on the product surface.

For medical and laboratory packaging projects, visit the official website: https://www.stlongsheng.com