The Story Behind AB Technology

AB Technology started with a problem nobody had solved yet.

At the time, the produce industry was shifting from traditional green berry baskets to plastic clamshell containers. The clamshell protected fruit better during shipping and stacked far more efficiently, but it brought a new headache with it: how do you apply labels and UPC barcodes fast enough to keep up with production?

Manual labeling couldn't keep pace.

That challenge landed on the desk of Ante Baskovic Sr., a trained engineer working for a company that manufactured labels. As demand for clamshell packaging grew, the company went looking for a way to automate the process, and they brought Ante Sr. a simple question:

Could this be automated?

His answer became the foundation of AB Technology.

Engineering the First Solution

The first challenge wasn't actually the labeling. It was handling the containers themselves.

Clamshells arrive tightly stacked from thermoforming machines. Before any label could be applied, the containers had to be separated, placed onto a conveyor, labeled, and then restacked for packing.

Ante Sr. designed a system that did exactly that. It included a denester to separate the containers, a conveyor to move them through the process, label applicators for accurate placement, and an upstacker to prepare the containers for the next stage of packaging.

What started as a fix for a single company quickly proved its worth. The system delivered the speed and consistency the growing produce industry was crying out for. Before long it was clear the opportunity reached well beyond one customer, and that realization led to the creation of AB Technology.

Growing Through Customer Collaboration

From the start, the company grew differently than a lot of equipment manufacturers.

Instead of designing machines in isolation, improvements came straight from the people running the equipment every day: operators, technicians, and plant managers. If an adjustment was awkward or a process could be simplified, the design evolved to match. Over time, that close collaboration shaped the equipment into highly efficient labeling systems built specifically for high-volume produce packaging.

As the systems proved themselves on the floor, the customer base grew largely by word of mouth across the produce packaging industry.

Expanding Beyond Labeling

As customers got more familiar with the equipment, they started asking whether AB Technology could automate other steps in the packaging process too.

One of the next big challenges was placing absorbent pads inside berry containers, used to capture moisture and keep fruit looking fresh. AB Technology developed padding systems to automate that step.

Eventually customers asked the natural next question: could labeling and padding happen in a single machine? That request led to the company's combo systems, letting processors handle both tasks in one pass instead of running containers through multiple pieces of equipment.

That same problem-solving instinct carried the technology well beyond produce. The denest-pad-restack approach proved just as valuable for meats, poultry, seafood, and alternative proteins, where absorbent pads keep trays clean and product looking fresh. Today that work lives on in the Protein Padding Machine, a fully integrated system that denests thermoformed trays, applies glue, inserts the pad, and restacks at speeds up to 170 containers per minute, with no-tool changeovers between sizes. It's a direct descendant of that first clamshell labeler, refined over more than 15 years in the field.

A Reputation Built Over Time

Today, AB Technology equipment runs in produce packaging facilities across the industry. But the core approach hasn't changed since that very first machine: listen carefully to customers, solve real production problems, and build equipment that performs reliably day after day.

That commitment, paired with decades of engineering experience, is still what defines the company and the solutions it delivers.

Want to see what that experience can do for your line? Talk to an Expert.