PETpla.net Insider 06 / 2013

The lines are mainly used to bottle Alomo Bitters, said to have an aphrodisiacal effect. BOTTLING / FILLING 32 PET planet insider Vol. 14 No. 06/13 www.petpla.net Krones PET line with 40,000bph at Kasapreko, Ghana Ghana gets straight to the point based on an article by Horst Meixner, Krones AG, In the West African nation of Ghana the privately owned enterprise Kasap- reko commissioned Krones’ fastest PET bottling plant in December 2012. Two lines, to be precise: a returnable-glass line rated at 30,000bph, and a PET line rated at 40,000bph. The lines are mainly used to bottle a herbal bitters product, said to have an aphrodisiacal effect. Almost every day, in the courtyard of Kasapreko’s facility in Ghana’s capi- tal Accra, stands a heavy goods truck from Nigeria with an open, overlength trailer. Early in the morning, three men begin to load the truck, carton by carton, each packed with 24 0.2l flat PET containers, filled with the herbal Alomo Bitters, with each carton weigh- ing 5.2kg. By the afternoon, the work- ers will have loaded precisely 10,000 cartons, for a load weighing 52t. The vehicle will be on the road for almost four days, always along the coast, and crossing three frontiers on its way: first to Togo, then to Benin, and finally Nigeria. Dr. Kwabena Adjei was supporting himself and his family as a small-scale trader. Towards the end of the 1980s, the time of revolutions in Ghana was finally over and business life was grad- ually returning to normal. There were already, of course, a whole series of spirits producers back then. But almost everyone was buying the flavourings from the same supplier, with the result that everything somehow tasted more or less the same. Dr. Adjei found a producer whose gin flavour accentu- ated the taste of juniper rather more vividly. In his garage in Accra’s suburb of Nungua, he teamed up with four employees to launch a small-scale bot- tling operation. In his ancient Volvo, he drove from bar to bar, and offered the proprietors his “Kasapreko Dry Gin” on a commission basis. This triggered a boom in demand. Up till then, the Ghanaians’ high expectations for taste, quality, safety and packaging had had to be met with costly imported goods. “Good quality doesn’t necessarily have to be expen- sive”, to quote Dr. Kwabena Adjei. Kasapreko was the first local producer to put in place a modern-day form of quality control and a product develop- ment lab, and to introduce an individu- alised bottle. Today, Kasapreko Dry Gin is the market leader in Ghana’s gin segment. With this vision, he kept on searching for new products. Tradition- ally, the Ghanaians marinate fresh herbs and spices in alcohol for extrac- tion, and use this form of bitters as a medicine to cure stomach problems or fever. Many small private producers also swear that their secret recipes have an aphrodisiacal effect. Dr. Adjei gave considerable thought as to how this secret could be industrially pack- aged in bottles. He consulted Africa’s leading research institute, which has specialised in tropical medicine, and had a recipe developed for a new kind of herbal spirit. He gave it the name of “Alomo”, a word from the widely used Ghanaian dialect Twi, which means roughly “my romantic interest” or simply “desire”. The word “Kasapreko” also comes from the Twi language: it’s the form of address for a tribal chief, and can be translated as “speaking with authority” or “getting straight to the point”. The eponymous chief, by the way, sits on Kasapreko’s supervi- sory board. At the beginning, Dr. Adjei was still using all sorts of different bottles, and even pre-owned cartons from other producers, which he turned inside out so as to conceal the printing. Profes- sional-style bottling began in 1997. Alomo Bitters were thus the first Gha- naian herbal bitters to be produced on an industrial scale, and proved to be a great success. Kasapreko sold five million cartons in 2012, 70% of which were bitters with 43% abv, using a 96% base alcohol.