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Innovations in Packaging
Is wine catching up to other beverages?
Recession, global warming and a new consumer willingness to experiment seem to be conspiring to make wine packages more varied, less expensive, lighter weight and higher tech than ever before. In this regard, wine packaging lags behind packaging for other beverage and food industries. Plastic twist-caps, synthetic labels and drink pouches, for instance, already are familiar to consumers of mineral water, soda and apple juice, but now they're coming to a winery near you. These and a sampling of other packaging innovations are introduced here in snapshot format.
BARRELS AND BAGS
Red Truck: Cylindrical bag-in-barrel makes debut:
Vintners sent wine to market in barrels for hundreds of years, but never in barrels quite like those newly released by 585 Wine Partners in a deal with Sam's Club stores to sell Red Truck-brand wines. Sam's Club has requested 100,000 of the cylindrical 3L bag-in-barrel units (shown above), said Katy Leese, co-founder and director of packaging design for the Sonoma, Calif.-based wine company.
Leese and her husband, 585 co-founder Dan Leese, brainstormed multiple ideas for an unusual large-format wine. "But when Dan made a trip to Nottingham Spirk Design Associates of Cleveland, Ohio, to explain the idea to them, that's when the idea began to take shape for the Mini Barrel." Industrial engineers there developed the idea into a workable package, including a plastic cylinder with "feet" to keep it from rolling and a patent-pending, built-in Opti-Flow incline that helps the wine drain toward the spout without the consumer tipping the package. A plastic shrink-wrap "label" covers the exterior with a barrel-like illustration and branding, and hoops rim the heads. With trademark and patents pending, 585 (585winepartners.com, (707) 933-2642) would not reveal all its suppliers but acknowledged that Scholle provided the bag and spouts.
585 touted the Mini Barrel's green credentials. "The carbon footprint reduction when you go from glass to this type of packaging is staggering, but until now, consumers have had very few choices in the 3L format," said Dave Mollison, director of production. Katy Leese declined to disclose the barrel's cost of production, but Mollison acknowledged that at this early stage it is relatively expensive compared to other bag-in-box packages, partly due to extra labor involved in assembling the barrels as they come off the packaging line.
Bags Without Boxes: Fill-cap machine enables wine pouches
PPi Technologies Global offers an automatic fill-and-cap machine that allows adventurous wineries not only an alternative to using heavy glass bottles, but also to eliminate the box part of the traditional bag-in-box package. The PSG ABT fill-cap machinery fills two types of wine pouches that are grown-up versions of the familiar juice packs.
Eliminating the traditional box shrinks the carbon footprint of the pouches and reduces garbage and volume of waste. It has a 90% overall lower footprint than glass containers, according to the Beverage Pouch Group of PPi Technologies of Sarasota, Fla. (ppitechnologies.com, (941) 359-6678). PPi added that the fill-cap machine can be loaded onto a truck and moved from winery to winery.
One pouch, the BarrelPaQ, is from VinoPaQ, a PPi company. A double-gusset pouch with double handholds, this package serves several types of products and spout designs. Another, the Bag-Without-a-Box design, is a joint venture between CLP Industries Ltd., a company with operations in Israel and Russia and a daughter company in the United States, (clp.co.il, (877) 888-1888) and ITW Fastex, using a full range of ITW Fastex spouts. The two pouches offer the customer similar benefits, but each has a distinctive design shape to allow brands to look different on the shelf.
CLOSURE INNOVATION
VinPerfect: MBA students develop liner
A new screwcap liner design that won its MBA-student inventors $15,000 last year is now in early development as the first product of a new company, VinPerfect, based in Davis, Calif. Three students in the University of California Graduate School of Management conceived a liner that can permit oxygen transfer at controlled rates to help resolve the issue of reduction aromas that develop in screwcapped wines as they age.
Tim Keller, one of the three inventors, is an experienced winemaker and a firm believer in screwcaps, but he feels they need perfecting. He explained that current screwcap liners, such as tin and Saranex, require oxygen to come into the bottle by going up and over the threads. VinPerfect relies on small holes punched in the top of the cap to admit the oxygen. It then regulate
s the rate of transfer into the headspace via elaborate pathways in multiple layers of the liner.
Keller said that the trio's infant company received its domestic and international patents in March, and he expects the product will be commercially available when R&D is completed in about two years. His co-inventors were also working on master's degrees at the time they won the Big Bang competition: Kevin Chartrand, who has an undergraduate degree in materials science and worked as a thin-film expert at IBM; and Diana Mejia, a former engineer for Anheuser-Busch.
Keller, whose day job is at a Davis energy company, is focused on further fundraising to bring VinPerfect (vinperfect.com, (707) 235-3730) to fruition.
WATERPROOF LABELS
Technicote: New adhesive lets labels stick in ice and water
Beginning in late 2006, Technicote of Miamisburg, Ohio, and other suppliers of pressure-sensitive labels began getting complaints from customers that their labels were loosening or slipping off bottles submerged in ice buckets and chilled bottles that were wet with condensation. This was a new and puzzling phenomenon for pressure-sensitive labels, though an old one for traditional paper-and-glue labels.
The wineries having trouble finally acknowledged that they had switched glass suppliers to save money, said Anthony Trimble, marketing product manager for Technicote (technicote.com, (800) 358-4448), whose research people then determined that the actual cause of the slippage was a change in the release agents used in bottle manufacturing. Release agents help the newly formed bottles come free from the molds, and they were being applied sporadically or not at all on some of the glass that the wineries had begun sourcing from countries like Mexico and China.
Technicote's solution was to develop a new adhesive, IP400, which resisted slippage from water, to offer as an alternative to its standard adhesive at a 5% increase in cost. The permanent acrylic adhesive is rated for temperatures of minus-65°F to 200°F and has a 3.2 pound-per-inch strength on glass for a 180°peel.
Labeltronix: Introduces a synthetic, waterproof label
Labeltronix took a different tack to address the ice bucket problem for wine labels. The Orange, Calif.-based supplier of labels, labeling systems and supplies adopted a synthetic label material and proprietary printing processes to produce high-quality wine labels that don't deteriorate or slip off in water.
"Paper-based labels covered in varnish tend to vanish," said company co-founder Eric Shepard in a news release. The trademarked Ice Bucket Label mimics the look of and costs the same as a paper label, but it is made with 2- to 3-mil polypropylene base material. A special adhesive and varnish help give the label material an advantage. The polypropylene is reverse-printed flexographically (see page 46 for more details) and can take foil-stamp decoration.
Winemaker Jon McPherson of South Coast Winery in California chose the Ice Bucket Label for his sparkling wines (which are often immersed in ice buckets). "The labels have great tack, and they don't bubble like other plastic labels," he told Labeltronix (labeltronix.com, (800) 429-4321). He found that the labels run at the same rates as before on his labelers, about 45 per minute. His testimonial can be viewed at a special website for this product: icebucketlabel.com.
PACKAGING LINE
Columbia Crest: High-tech packaging line wins award
Columbia Crest Winery won the "Packaging Line of the Year Award" in 2008 for its new high-tech, high-speed packaging line that incorporates a slew of innovations. PMT, the magazine of the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute, recognized Columbia Crest for changes as seemingly simple as short partitions for case shippers that saved 50% of the recycled cardboard, to an elaborate logistical change that moved away from "kits" of bottles in case shippers for their reverse taper bottles to a bulk glass supply and shippers that were not filled until the bottling run.
Columbia Crest's packaging line covers 30,000 square feet out of 1 million-plus square feet in the Paterson, Wash., winery. "The original bottling line was installed in 2002, but as the company grew and the demand increased, we recognized the need to update the line," Rob McKinney, director of operations for parent company Ste. Michelle Estates, told PMT.
This packaging
line incorporates a partition inserter, designed in partnership with Wayne Automation based in Norristown, Pa., that places a short shunted partition into a filled case of glass bottles--apparently a first for the wine industry. Ste. Michelle also installed a state-of-the-art data tracking system, allowing its employees--from line operators to engineers--to access data from the plant floor, enabling them to diagnose bottlenecks, detect jams and troubleshoot line stoppages.
Demolition on the old line began in November 2007, and the new line was fully operational by mid-January 2008. While a typical payback on a line renovation of this size would be three to five years, the payback on this line is 2.18 years. The internal rate of return (IRR) is 49%. "The scrap rate goal for the line was less than 0.4%; we are currently at .38%. This is above the industry standard," said Blair North, facilities manager. The line demolition happened during a tight November through December shutdown. "We were making our numbers in less then four weeks," North said.
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