Bottle carriers quash the 'crunch' at Pepsi
January 30, 2014
New bottle carriers (inside shipping case) position ½-L |
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.