PETpla.net Insider 01+02 / 2012

REGIONAL MARKET REPORTS 18 PET planet insider Vol. 13 No. 01+02/12 www.petpla.net viable route. At the same time, with the help of the aseptic line, Fruvita have succeeded in tripling their turnover in just one year. www.fruvita.com EnergoPET We met: Miroslav Popović, General Manager Sasa Zdravković, Technical Director Nebojsa Tanasković, Production Manager Nenad Krstić, Head of Maintenance Department Nebojsa Tanasković, Miroslav Popović, Sasa Zdravković (F.l.t.r.) It’s the colour that does it Bottlers such as Coca-Cola produce clear standard pre- forms themselves in large-scale production. However, it is in coloured preforms where the real margins lie and but nobody really has much too confidence in them. Changes in colour can be both too time-consuming and too expensive. Here in Serbia the best in its class – even if not quite all the Balkan states – is EnergoPET. No colour is too outlandish for them. As is the case all over the world, earning money with stand- ard preforms is difficult. A small fluctuation in material prices and bang goes the profit margin. Things are better where customer-specific preforms are concerned; here the quanti- ties may be smaller but margins are better. And it is precisely here that Energo PET, located close to the airport in Belgrade, comes in. In addition to the “plain” preforms, everything at EnergoPET has its colour. And it’s not only blue preforms for the water bottles, coloured preforms for the CSD industry or brown ones for the beer either; here there is a preponderance of special colours in particular pouring off the conveyor belt. The milk industry demands white and pink-coloured preforms, other customers want red or green variations. One highlight just has to be the gold-coloured preforms that EnergoPET once produced for a particular marketing campaign using injection moulding. No colour is too outlandish to be used in a preform. Nevertheless, for Miroslav Popović, General Man- ager, standard preforms also represent an important arm of the business. “It ensures that we get basic capacity utilisation out of the equipment“ or so he contends. But because margins are generally tight, EnergoPET has introduced an extensive IT system. Everything is immedi- ately registered everywhere, each octabin gets its own bar code, the material is booked out from the stores immedi- Fruvita We met: Ivan Petrović, Maintenance Engineer Marjan Gavrilović, Mechanical Engineer Dragan Nikolić, Maintenance Manager Marjan Gavrilović , Ivan Petrović́, Dragan Nicoloic and Alexander Büchler (F.l.t.r.) Always fresh This is the way I imagine the land flowing with milk and honey. The area around Lunjevac resembles nothing so much as a constantly burgeoning fruit orchard. This is the fruit and vine cultivating region of Serbia and it was clear to Fruvita that this treasure chest of nature had to be got into a bottle. In order to extract the taste producing substances, Fruvita adopt an entirely aseptical approach to their filling operations. Both cartons and PET bottles are used. In the case of the carton, the Serbs have opted for the out-of-the-ordinary Tetra Gemina Aseptic gable-top packaging and, as regards PET aseptics, they have gone for KHS. Dragan Nikolic, Maintenance Manager, actually prefers to use PET bottles for his filling operations. These involve considerably less expense than carton packaging, plus the consumer can see what he is getting. For the 1.5l bottle they use a 39g preform. But the Serbs still have a soft spot for their cartons. When it comes to handling the top premium segment with 100% fruit, Fruvita have opted for a carton. However, the bulk then goes into the PET bottles. Here the company’s range includes juices with a 50% or a 15% fruit content. The moneyspinner here is the large 1.5l pack. In addition to the Tetra line with a capacity of 6,000l/h, the company also has an SIG Combibloc with a 5,000 cartons/h capacity for the 2l cartons. The KHS line is a smooth runner in the truest sense of the word. At the time of purchase the Serbs decided to go for dry sterilisation. This has made it possible to shrink the area covered by the clean room from 65m² (wet sterilisation) down to 15m². And here Maintenance Engineer Ivan Petrović is think- ing ahead. He is dreaming of the aseptic linear KHS plant Innosept Asbofill, where the clean room is considerably smaller and constructed on a considerably more compact scale whilst maintaining the same capacity of 15,000bph. In total, Fruvita fill 6 million bottles per month using the KHS plant; when it comes to cartons, the total is 4.5 mil- lion and this total is on a downward trend. Fruvita are on their own in the region with their aseptic line. Other bottlers are still thinking about whether this represents a