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Grup Carinsa, the Catalan company that creates and manufactures fragrances, flavours and functional ingredients and sells in 58 countries, will invest €40 million in four new sites in Sant Quirze del Vallès (Barcelona), as reported on 18 September by Next in Beauty Magazine. The first, «Expansión», will be a plant for the food sector producing powder solutions; it will open next year and multiply current capacity for that product tenfold. It will be followed by «Wow», an industrial centre for perfumery and liquid formulations; «Carinsa Tech», an R&D and innovation hub; and the future corporate headquarters.
Once the whole complex is running, the group's overall production capacity will be multiplied by thirty and its workforce will exceed 300 people, with profiles in R&D, process engineering, quality control, internationalisation and digitalisation. The company turned over €66 million in 2025 and expects to exceed €70 million this year. In an interview with the newspaper Ara in January, its management had already said the new buildings would be very different from the current ones: automated and digitised.
What it means for a packaging plant
A plant that multiplies its capacity tenfold is not just one more line: it means more machines, more shifts and less room for a breakdown to stop production. And start-up is the only moment when all the equipment is new, aligned and properly installed. If you measure then, the plant has a reference for how each motor, gearbox and bearing sounds, vibrates, heats up and consumes power when everything is running well. Without that reference, predictive maintenance starts years later with no baseline, when nobody knows any longer what normal looks like.
Powder adds reasons of its own. In dosing units, screw conveyors, mixers and pneumatic conveying, the product penetrates bearings and seals, and wear progresses unseen until the equipment overheats or jams. A slow rise in a motor's vibration or power draw often gives weeks of warning. On packaging machines, a sealing jaw that loses temperature or a filter that clogs shows up first in the data and only later in the waste.
Doing it from the outset is also cheaper: wiring, measuring points and the connection to the PLC are planned into the project, instead of being added while the plant is producing. Our page on predictive maintenance explains how sensors and AI are combined to learn the normal behaviour of each machine and warn before a breakdown.
Four keys to starting up a plant that measures
- Choose the critical equipment: the machines that stop the whole line if they fail, such as dosing units, mixers, compressors and the packaging machine.
- Record the reference at commissioning: vibration, temperature and power draw of each motor with the machine new and at real speed.
- Plan the measurement into the project: sensor points, wiring and open communication with the PLC (OPC UA, Modbus TCP) before the cabinets are closed.
- Measure results from the start: MTBF and MTTR per machine, to know whether the maintenance plan is working.
A €40 million investment shows up in capacity; whether that capacity is available every shift depends on what is decided before start-up. If you are preparing a new plant or line, let's talk.
