Tea in hot-fillable PET

Tetley Canada has launched Tetley iced teas in a 16-oz, long-neck PowerFlex™ polyethylene terephthalate bottle from Amcor PET Packaging (www.amcor.com). The four-flavor line is also available in 64-oz bottles, also from Amcor. “With the number-one tea brand in Canada, our goal was to gain a larger presence in the cold tea segment,” explains Kurt Hatherly, a development manager for Tetley Canada. “It was important to find a bottle that would help us communicate a unique image.”

Hatherly also says that Tetley wanted premium packaging without the expense of a proprietary bottle.

“We went back and forth between PET and glass, trying to come up with the best choice,” he notes. With the recent launch of PowerFlex, beverage bottlers have a PET alternative that meets both hot-fill and esthetic requirements, thereby allowing premium brands of juices, teas, isotonic drinks and more to seek alternatives to glass containers. The PowerFlex bottle has a patented, panel-less design that can be hot-filled (185-deg-F) and the large, smooth label panel is free of any kind of ribbing. The structure absorbs vacuum via a specially designed base. A unique diaphragm within the base draws upward as the liquid cools. The inverted, cone-shaped diaphragm deflects upward as a vacuum is created. “We were looking for a solution that would work well with the label we were envisioning,” Hatherly adds. The 16-oz PowerFlex that Tetley uses has a 38-mm finish. The transparent shrink sleeve label, designed by Corporate Visuals, Inc. (www.corporatevisualsinc.com), Toronto, is flexo-printed in seven colors keyed to the four flavors.