PETpla.net Insider 05 / 2017

BOTTLING / FILLING PET planet Insider Vol. 18 No. 05/17 www.petpla.net 35 Tour Sponsors: Japan in Indonesia! by Alexander Büchler PT Hokkan Indonesia, Bogor, February 18, 2017 We met: Mr Nasruddin Suyuti, Marketing & Sales There are two aseptic facilities at Japanese company PT Hokkan Indonesia’s site in Bogor. The first began as a Sidel wet aseptic facility in 2012 with 600bpm, the other started as a dry aseptic in 2015, also by Sidel and also with 600bpm. Hokkan does not use its own brand in its Indonesian facilities, rather it is purely a bottling company for other OEMs, focusing on manufacturing RTD coffee and tea with milk. My first meeting on the tour was not in the factory, rather, I was invited to the Old Town Café in Bogor shop- ping centre. I was greeted by Mr Nas- ruddin Suyuti who works in marketing & sales for Hokkan. We chatted about the various products bottled in PET and the characteristics of the Indone- sian market. But first of all, we talked about Hokkan. Both facilities fill bottles between 200 and 500ml in size. The new plant operates seven days a week, whereas the earlier plant only operates five days a week at the moment. Hokkan Indonesia is able to draw on the extensive expertise of their parent company in the field of packaging and beverage production, a fact which does not go unnoticed by their customers. Two years ago, Hokkan started a small test centre in Bogor in order to speed up their pro- duction processes; this centre manu- factures pre-production batches within the space of a day in order to perform durability tests, as well as other simi- lar checks. Nasruddin calls what they offer to their customers a ‘Total Pack- aging Solution’ (TPS). For example, if a customer comes to them with a new recipe or product, Hokkan analyses the recipe and tries to achieve the same flavour by using less expensive ingredients. What makes Hokkan stand out from the crowd is that they produce their own preforms. They have also installed Husky preform equipment in both their aseptic facilities; the earlier plant has 72-cavity equipment, while the newer plant is equipped with 96-cavity moulds. They manufacture a single preform size of 17 grams which can be used for all bottles with volumes ranging from 200 to 500ml. They’re also considering the possibil- ity of using a slightly lighter preform for bottles 330ml and smaller in the future. But moulding aseptic bottles is a lot more complex than the moulding process for bottles in the water indus- try, as any attempt to save on materi- als might turn out to be detrimental. In total, there are 35 different prod- ucts from 14 different brand-owners in production across both facilities and besides tea and coconut water, they mainly produce coffee with milk and sugar. Hokkan regards itself as a pioneer for beverage production in Indonesia and the locals regard their products as energy drinks: if you drink coffee with milk when you are driving, you won’t get tired. Meanwhile, RTD coffee with milk has captured 1% of the entire drinks market in Indonesia. So that was all the theory we dis- cussed over coffee. Then off we went to the supermarket, where Nasruddin showed me the special characteristics of the market first hand - with regards to an overwhelming amount of bottles. First of all, he pointed out Indonesia’s price-sensitivity. A product is classified as affordable if it costs under 6,000 Indonesian Rupiah (IDR) (40 cents). And in fact almost all the products are under this threshold. Newcomers to the market, as well as any products rapidly gaining popularity, cost under 3,000 IDR. Anything costing over 6,000 IDR is regarded purely as a luxury product. The shapes of RTD coffee and tea bottles vary from the classic curved forms to angular shapes, all the way to bottles which have lumps and bumps. Some bottles are even shaped to look like animals or dolls. It is obvious which designs have been victims of material conservation. And there is RTD coffee and tea on every shelf. The product display areas in the supermarket do not reflect the market shares of individual kinds of bever- ages. Water and CSDs are almost drowning in a sea of tea and coffee. Nestlé is the only brand to offer RTD, in an attempt to capture the market for themselves with cans or cartons. www.hokkan.co.id Nasruddin Suyuti, Marketing & Sales, PT Hokkan Indonesia, in front of supermarket shelves with two of their customers’ products in his hands Go with the flow. South East Asia Road Show