Also of significance, Krones has now built seven PET bottle recycling plants around the world. That’s real investment in the future.
As with small-step innovation and fine-tuning for brands, so with filling equipment. KHS was displaying many minor improvements that add up to big efficiencies and savings. It had its own take on eco-saving multipacks, with bottles held together by blobs of glue to save on straps, plus direct printing onto bottles.
Of greatest note to me were two plug-and-play units that can be unpacked straight from containers and plugged in for production. One was a flash pasteuriser and the other for cleaning and filling beer kegs. Both are substantial space savers.
More ideas from another major exhibitor at Drinktec, Döhler is pushing out the boundaries in several new ways, of which I would highlight a few.
So, what else? The truth is that Drinktec is huge, genuinely global, rather overwhelming but enormously rewarding. I only managed to visit a tiny proportion of the stands, but kept finding new insights. Other innovations that I thought were significant include:
It’s not so long ago that cans seemed all the same. No longer. At Drinktec, Rexam showed off a rich range of customised innovation.
The newest was its ability to print up to 24 different labels for a single pallet, which enabled Coca-Cola to launch individually named cans in Spain for the first time in the world this month.
Also on display were a wide variety of embossing and ink options, which change colour in response to temperature and light. These colour changes may now be applied to the tops of cans, which is another first.
So many gems in so little time.
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