Peter Wuerl

January 30, 2014

8 Min Read
Bottle carriers quash the 'crunch' at Pepsi

152373-pdx0804pepsi2.jpg

New bottle carriers (inside shipping case) position ½-L 
six-packs of Everest water bottles securely and eliminate 
having to ‘crunch’ a handle over them.


Pepsi Oneta, a regional bottler in Corpus Christi, TX, is happily forging a path in the shadow of larger national bottlers, due to a switch to multipack beverage carriers from Roberts PolyPro (www.robertspolypro.com) for its ½-L six-packs of Everest water. Brant Windham, operations manager at the independent Pepsi Oneta, says his firm had been using a stiff, contoured handle for the multipacks that posed significant challenges in operator and process efficiency. Operators would become so fatigued after a few hours of wrestling the rigid carriers onto the Everest water bottles that a crew of three was needed to ensure that a fresh operator was always available. The process had become inefficient and costly.

“It required one individual to take a manual applicator, and for lack of a better term, 'crunch' the contours over the necks of the bottles,” says Windham. Not only did the handles cause production challenges at the plant, additional concerns surfaced when the water reached the marketplace.

“With the handles, consumers had complaints, especially with their low contours and sharp edges when they were picked up,” says Windham. All of that changed with the introduction more than a year ago of the B626.28BL six-pack pop-up bottle carriers from Roberts PolyPro.The handles are made of high density polyethylene (HDPE) and are very strong, yet flexible. Now, only one operator is needed to easily handle what had been the job of three people.

“The new handles are a lot easier to apply,” adds Windham. “One person can continually apply them for eight or ten hours without injury. It's much more efficient. We don't have to change operators.”

The carriers are 100-percent-recyclable. Made from extruded sheets, the handle gauge is 0.035 in., ± 0.001 in.

The design of the carriers can cut shipping and storage costs by 25 percent, compared to competitive carriers, according to Roberts PolyPro. Windham confirms that the carriers have indeed contributed to savings in the plant. A proprietary feature allows the carrier handle to pop up like a suitcase handle once it is picked up. This makes it comfortable for the consumer and also allows for easy removal of the bottles from a shipping case.

Roberts PolyPro says it provides a single source for handles as well as a complete range of application equipment for any bottler's needs. At Pepsi Oneta, along with the bottle carriers, Roberts PolyPro also provided its manual applicator.

Switching from the previous carriers to the Roberts PolyPro carriers was no problem. “It was very simple for us to integrate into our line,” says Windham. “It was just a matter of patching an air line to that position and training the operator. It was a very smooth transition.”

When Pepsi Oneta began to use the Roberts PolyPro carriers, it became the first Roberts PolyPro installation to apply bottle carriers simultaneously to four six-packs.

The firm occupies one facility in Corpus Christi where production, warehousing and distribution take place. With a total of 200 full-time employees, Pepsi Oneta is “a relatively small operation,” says Windham. “We're one of the last independent bottlers. There aren't very many around anymore.”

The modern history of Pepsi Oneta dates to 1972, when Karl Koch, who had a long family history in the beverage business, bought the Corpus Christi franchise for Pepsi. In the early 1980s he decided that bottled water was going to become very popular. So, in 1985, he introduced Everest Premium Water. This drink became the prototype for Pepsi's Aquafina water.

The Corpus Christi plant has three production lines. According to Windham, the lines are designated as the “5-gal line,” the “1-gal line,” and the “PET multipurpose line.” The new handles are utilized on the polyethylene terephthlatate (PET) line for ½-L six-packs of Everest bottled water. In addition to Everest water, the line also bottles Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Mountain Dew. The process at Pepsi Oneta starts as trucks deliver palletized ½-L empty bottles. Upon arrival at the plant, the pallets are loaded by forklift onto a repalletizer, which automatically sweeps off the bottles, one layer at a time. The bottles then travel along a conveyor and form into a single-file line. From there, the bottles move to a lowerator, where they are turned upside-down.

After being rinsed and sanitized, the bottles are turned right side up. The bottles then move to another conveyor and onto an 8-ft-dia. rotary crown 42-head filler. The unit fills approximately 360 bottles/min.

Once the bottles are filled, they are capped by an Alcoa (www.alcoa.com/csi.) capper. The bottles are then warmed, sent to an accumulation conveyor, and are fed into a Hartness (www.hartness.com) drop packer. They're then loaded into corrugated cases. The sides of the cases reach to a point that is ¾ of the height of the ½-L bottles. Each case holds 24 bottles. The cases are then conveyed to the carrier applicator station where the carriers are applied.

There, an operator loads the carriers onto a dispenser. The carriers come in corrugated cases on pallets. Before the shift, an operator opens up one of the cases and hand stacks the applicator with the PolyPro carriers onto the dispenser. The dispenser has two rods for each six-pack, or eight total rods. The operator places the carriers on the rods and they fall into place.

The manual multipack handle applicator is a compact, lightweight hand-held device. The device allows quick application of the six-pack handles and was easily mounted directly onto the PET line. The applicator is air-actuated and uses vacuum to pick up the four carriers. With one easy movement, the operator can pick up the carriers and place them onto the necks of the bottles.

“It's very ergonomically designed, there's very little movement for the operator as far as twisting, bending or stooping over,” says Windham. “The operator's movements have been reduced quite a bit, so it's more efficient.”

After the carriers are applied, the cases travel to another conveyor and then to an incline conveyor. From there, the cases head to a palletizer where each case is oriented into position so that there are eight cases in a square pattern on one layer of the pallet. Each pallet is six cases-high, resulting in 48 cases per pallet. The pallets are then lowered via a mechanical elevator and rolled onto a mechanical conveyor. The pallets proceed to a Lantech (www.lantech.com) wrapper, where they are encased in stretch wrap. On an average 8-hr shift, the PET line processes 3,500 cases of Everest water.

The water is shipped into Southeastern Texas within a roughly 200-mi radius of Corpus Christi. Major customers include Stripes retail convenience stores as well as small grocery stores and restaurants that are supplied through contract brokers. Even though Pepsi Oneta is achieving success as a regional player, Windham says the company has its sights set on market expansion.

“Obviously we'd like to grow,” he says. “We have a niche market down here, a nice pocket, but we're looking to expand. We're looking at doing Everest infused with aloe vera juice as a health drink. We're in product testing.”

Pepsi Oneta has a six-step purification process for the raw water used in its operation. The first step is complete sand and gravel filtration, which removes suspended matter from the raw water. The second step is an ion-exchange softening process that removes hardness caused by calcium and magnesium. Step Three is reverse osmosis in which organic and inorganic components are separated from the water. This step bascially removes dissolved solids, including bacteria, heavy metals, lead and sodium.

The fourth step is active carbon filtration, where odor and taste are controlled. Deionization is the fifth step, and it uses anions and cations to eliminate water contaminants. The final step uses ozone as a natural disinfectant to eliminate bacteria, viruses and pyrogens. Everest water qualifies under state and federal regulations as a “purified water,” free of sodium, chemicals and organic compounds. Pepsi Oneta is a recipient of Pepsi-Cola Company's prestigious Caleb Bradham award for product quality.

With a focus on quality in its products and packaging, it is no surprise that Pepsi Oneta picked Roberts PolyPro for its Everest Water bottle carriers. Looking back, Windham says he feels that Pepsi Oneta made the right choice in switching to the Roberts PolyPro carriers. “From day one, it worked well for us,” he says. “Going from where we came from to this process has become a tremendous win for us.”


More information is available:

Roberts PolyPro, 800/369-7409. www.robertspolypro.com.

Alcoa Closure Systems Intl., 317/490-5000. www.alcoa.com/csi.

Hartness Intl., Inc., 800/845-8791. www.hartness..com.

Lantech.com, 800/866-0322. www.lantech.com.

Sign up for the Packaging Digest News & Insights newsletter.

You May Also Like