At the request of the South African Government (when the apartheid sanctions against South Africa were lifted), the Plastics Industries Society of South Africa, and Nampak, Gigliotti and Strachan organized a three-week series of workshops and conferences on the subject of 'World Class Manufacturing of Plastic Containers for the Food & Beverage Industry.'�  The participants from the USA included Alfred Alberghini, Dr. David Williams, Dewey Rainville, Irv Rubin, William McConnell, and other distinguished USA plastics authorities. 

Also in the early 1980s, Gigliotti was contacted by Dr. Emery Valyi, whom he had met in the 1940s when Valyi came to Monsanto to acquire a special volatile form of polystyrene for use in his work at the Manhattan Atomic Bomb Project.  Dr. Valyi asked Michael and Allan Griff to join him in a consortium to take on a major two-year project for Lesieur Cotelle E Frere, the large French P&G-style provider of toiletries and cooking oils.  Lesieur Cotelle operated three plastic bottle making facilities, which had poor performance and high costs, plus the PVC plastic bottles they used for their peanut cooking oil had been suffering from vacuum collapse on the shelf. 

They wanted the Valyi-Gigliotti-Griff team to take on evaluating their plastic container activities and recommending/supervising corrective actions.  The team recommended the use of PET resin instead of PVC and a new shape (patterned after the Michelob beer bottle in the USA) for the oil bottle.  The new bottle was named 'avril'�.  For the development and market trials of the new Avril oil bottle, the team contracted with DYNAPLAST Company in Geneva, Switzerland, a small, but highly successful, PET bottle manufacturer, owned by Dr. Glauco Curetti.

Also recommended was a complete overhaul of all of the blow molding equipment to unify the machines under one design.  Of the 15 machines operated in three plants by Lesieur Cotelle, there were no two alike, because Lesieur plus a PVC resin manufacturer had partnered in the forming of SIDEL to make the blow molding machinery; SIDEL had used the Lesieur plants as its experimental development location.  Mr Lesieur and his associates celebrated the team's successful completion of these projects by way of a formal dinner party in Lesieur's Paris home, at which all present spoke perfect English, a surprise to the team, because all meetings with the Lesieur executives were conducted in French through interpreters!