SIPA Brand Guidelines: The Zoppas Automation Firm in Vittorio Veneto That Turned to PET

Set up inside a Treviso family group.

SIPA’s name is an acronym: Società Industrializzazione Progettazione Automazione, in the company’s own version, for a firm it says was founded in 1980 “as an engineering company to provide integrated systems for flexible automation.” Italian Wikipedia gives a slightly longer form of the name and says the Zoppas group entered the business of machinery for plastics by setting up SIPA that year, with its head office and plant at Vittorio Veneto, in the province of Treviso. The trade reference WikiPETia also gives 1980.

The family name behind it has a longer story, and two separate companies carry it. The appliance maker Zoppas grew from a hardware shop opened at Conegliano in 1923, Italian Wikipedia says, and was absorbed into Zanussi in 1973, later passing with it to Electrolux. The group that owns SIPA descends from a different business: IRCA, or Industria Resistenze Corazzate e Affini, founded at San Vendemiano in 1963 by Luigi Zoppas, at first as a supplier of components to the appliance firm.

In 1970 the running of IRCA passed to his son, Gianfranco Zoppas, and Italian Wikipedia describes a series of new divisions in heating elements through the 1970s before SIPA arrived. Zoppas Industries, the group’s present name, is today described by Economica, the Romanian business site, as a specialist in thermal solutions and heating elements for industries including appliances and automotive.

SIPA’s place in that group is well documented. Petnology described it in 2013 as part of Zoppas Industries Group, with Gianfranco Zoppas as chairman of SIPA. ItaliaOggi reported the same arrangement on 26 October 2026, calling SIPA a company of the Zoppas Industries group, chaired by Gianfranco Zoppas and led by general manager Antonio Narder.

One step, then two.

The turn to bottles came six years after the founding. The company says that in 1986 it made “a strategic move” into PET packaging and acquired a licence from a US company to produce polyethylene terephthalate bottles by a one-step process, and WikiPETia says the same. In 1988 it sold its first one-step machine, rated at 4,000 bottles an hour, for mineral-water bottles.

By 1989, the company’s timeline says, plastic packaging had become its main focus. It added a range of small linear blowing machines, the SF line, to the one-step ECS range. In 1990 it invested in its tooling department so that it could make its injection and blowing moulds internally. It dates its first machines at Coca-Cola to 1994, and its first injection machine for PET preforms to 1996.

Those steps made up a wider range. The SFR rotary blow moulder arrived in 1999, and by 2000, the company says, its products covered one-step systems, two-step injection and two-step blowing. It also began making moulds for competitors’ machines as well as its own.

The deal that took it beyond bottle making came in 2008. On 1 September that year SIPA acquired 100% of Berchi Group, a Parma maker of complete bottling and packaging lines, Petnology reported three days later; Italian Wikipedia cites La Tribuna di Treviso for the same purchase. The deal brought filling and end-of-line equipment into the company, and the phrase SIPA used for the result was “from pellet to pallet.”

Newer product names followed. XFORM 500, for preform injection, dates from 2012, and XTREME, an injection-compression system for preforms, from 2013. In 2014 SIPA took on the injection-stretch-blow-moulding activities of another Italian company, Automa, and in 2016 it says it strengthened a partnership with Engel Austria on preform systems. Filling came along too: Flextronic in 2013, the Isotronic G for glass bottles in 2023, and a first roll-fed labeller of its own, XLABL, in 2025.

How the category presents itself.

Machinery for plastics film, sheet and recycling is sold to plant owners and engineers, and its makers build their image on the machines themselves. The tallest of them is the blown-film tower, where a shining bubble of film rises several storeys before it is flattened and wound. Wide cast lines and winders offer the same kind of picture lying down: long, level and glossy, with the finished roll as the closing shot.

Close-ups supply the colour. Extruder barrels, guards and control cabinets are often finished in brand colours, which makes the livery of the line one of the few visual assets a maker fully owns. Thermoforming makers favour the end of the line, with formed trays stacking up as they leave the machine. Makers of bottles and preforms show rows of finished shapes.

Recycling has added its own set of pictures. Pellets in glass jars, shown before and after processing, turn an industrial step into something that can sit on a table at a trade stand. Bales of used film do the opposite job, showing the raw material as it arrives. Both images need careful handling, because they suggest a result that the words around them should state plainly and with a source.

The category’s main stages are its trade fairs, among them K in Düsseldorf, NPE in the United States, Plastpol in Poland and Fakuma in Germany. Stands there often feature running machinery. For a designer, this is a field where the identity has to work on a steel guard, a touch screen and a technical data sheet as well as on a web page. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker and leaves the rest out.

“The PET Specialist.”

Two recent awards concern recycled material. XTREME Renew, a system for making preforms directly from flakes of used PET, was co-developed with the Austrian recycling-machinery maker EREMA. It won a WorldStar Packaging Award from the World Packaging Organisation at a ceremony in Prague on 15 May 2019, Petnology reported, and the Japanese recycler Kyoei Industry was among the partners cited. SIPA dates the system’s launch to 2017 and its first commercial installation, in Japan, to 2018.

A successor came later. The company says it officially launched XFORM Renew in 2025, and that year Packaging Europe named it a winner at its Sustainability Awards.

Its manufacturing footprint is stated by both the company and the press. SIPA’s website lists four manufacturing facilities: two in Italy, one in Romania and one in China. ItaliaOggi named them in October 2026 as Vittorio Veneto, Sala Baganza in the province of Parma, Timișoara and Hangzhou. It said the Vittorio Veneto headquarters designs and makes preform injection systems, blowing machines and moulds, that the Hangzhou plant does the same for the Far East, and that about 900 people work directly for the company in Italy. It also put exports at more than 95% of production. In Timișoara, Economica reported in March 2025, SIPA Engineering Romania employs 104 people on design services for machines and moulds.

The website adds 23 sales branches, 21 service centres and seven refurbishment centres for injection moulds. It also says SIPA has a bottle-design and engineering operation, and that it builds moulds for its own systems and others’. The company’s line for itself is “The PET Specialist,” and its website, which runs on sipasolutions.com, loads the Lato typeface. The website states its vision as “to innovate beverage packaging making it zero impact.”

For a design guide, SIPA shows how an acronym chosen for automation can come to stand for a single material. Compare EREMA, its partner on XTREME Renew, and Sidel, a French name in PET blow moulding. For this guide we use a deep teal and pale bottle blues with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep SIPA’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.