PETpla.net Insider 09 / 2016

CAPPING / CLOSURES 14 PET planet insider Vol. 17 No. 09/16 www.petpla.net SPONSORS The China Road Show Local closure manufacturers making inroads into beverage market May 31, 2016 - Bericap Shanghai We met: Michael Chen, Managing Director F.l.t.r.: Michael Chen, Managing Director of Bericap China and Alexander Büchler, PET- planet Insider in front of the Editourmobil In 1997, the plant in Kunshan near Shanghai was Bericap’s first plant in Asia. Since then, a second plant has been added in the south, and the new plant in Malaysia that replaced the facility in Singapore is only one year young. We are meeting Michael Chen, who has been Bericap China’s Managing Director for ten years. In the Kunshan plant, Bericap produces for almost all target mar- kets, such as beverages, foods and non-foods. As the peak seasons of the different sectors in general follow one another with some overlap, this provides a good overall workload for the plant, with its 66 injection mould- ing machines and a production of 4.2 billion closures. Beverages do well in the summer, from April to September. The festival season, which reaches its peak with the Chinese New Year in February, is hot on summer’s heels, foods and non-food applications ensure fully-occupied machines in between these times. One focus is the closure for edible oil and sauce. In China there have been a few scandals around oil, where used oil was collected, cleaned, and sold again in original bottles. For this reason, Chinese con- sumers are very wary today, making sure they’re only getting originally sealed containers. So far, Bericap has been supplying a closure for this with a safety tear-off band that fits onto a double clips neck finish. Refilling while not destroying the original closure was difficult, but feasible. In discussions with his customers, Bericap China has been undeterred in offering some- thing that can no longer be resealed without leaving traces. This became a closure that looks the same from the outside with a safety tear-off band, but attaches itself at the single ring neck using a flex band in such a way that it cannot be taken off anymore without showing signs of tampering.