A fully integrated filling and bottling line formed entirely from SIG Group machinery forms the centrepiece of a new £8m bottling hall officially opened by leading UK brewer Greene King on May 11 in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.
The line, one of Europe’s most advanced, will eventually fill and package over 50 different Greene King beer brands, and can handle up to 25,000 bottles/hr. The bottled beers will be sold through multiples, convenience stores, independent retailers, off-licences and the on-trade and via export. The single biggest investment since Greene King’s original brewhouse was built in Bury’s Westgate Street in 1938, the spend follows an 8% increase in the company’s overall beer market share between March 2005 and March 2006.
Bottling at Westgate Street, which still undertakes all brewing, ceased in 1997. Since then the brewer has used contract packers throughout the UK. Although md Justin Adams said this had “worked very well”, with the company’s market share rising every year the brewer was keen to take bottling back in-house. Speaking at the opening of the Old Speckled Hen Hall, a former Britvic distribution centre now extensively refurbished, Adams said: “Quality and flexibility are our top priorities and this gives us complete control over the whole brewing process.”
Operations director Steve Magnall said the new facility would also reduce Greene King’s HGV travel by at least 200,000 miles/year thanks by eliminating lorry trips to external packers. The investment has also seen construction of a new 3,700 sq m warehouse, able to hold up to four million bottles and cans, and a quality control lab.
During a plant tour chief engineer for the project David Carr enthused: “The new equipment’s speed and efficiency is very impressive. We are working with eight different bottles sizes in designs, but the system takes it all in its stride.”
SIG was chosen as the main equipment supplier after a competitive tender. At the line’s heart is a SIG Eurotronica PN70/80/15 rinser, filler and crowner. Bottles enter in single file, are rinsed, the air evacuated under vacuum and the containers purged with carbon dioxide. The process is repeated before filling and crowning
Bottles then travel to the inspection area, where a Heuft machine checks for fill height, before they pass into one of two labelling systems – a SIG Alpha Adhesive F5535T pressure-sensitive label applicator for 750ml bottles of Old Speckled Hen, Beer to Dine for and Strong Suffolk Vintage Ale and a SIG Alpha Topbrain wet glue labeller for 500ml bottles with front, back and neck labels.
The SMI Group-supplied secondary packaging line provides for three pack formats - 4 packs are produced on an MP200 cluster machine, shrinkwrapped trays on an SK450T and wraparound boxes on an SMI WP600. The outers are automatically loaded onto pallets, in layers of four for 750ml bottles and six for 500ml containers, which are then bound on a Robopack shrinkwrapper and labelled on Markem machine. Best before end dates are applied by Videojet printers.
