PETpla.net Insider 03 / 2018

BOTTLING / FILLING PET planet Insider Vol. 19 No. 03/18 www.petpla.net 33 From juice manufacturer to PET blow moulding Keeling F. Juices Ltd. position themselves as the producer of quality juice products that not only taste fresh but also retain the maximum amount of minerals and vitamins. This is normally achieved by cold pressing as pasteurisation reduces the amount of goodness within the juice. Filling Special CEO John Keeling (on the left) and Operations Director Adrian Kavanagh (on the right) The main downside of cold-press- ing is the short product shelf-life; Keel- ing Juices has therefore been using the innovative HPP method in their production to extend it. High Pressure Processing (HPP) is a cold pas- teurisation technique whereby freshly squeezed juice is bottled in a pressure- resistant PET container and treated by high level of hydrostatic pressure (transmitted by water). This is a safe way to get rid of unwanted microbial content, and save the nutrients. Keeling Juices is owned by Fred Keeling, and he, together with his team, is continuously working to advance the quality and value of healthy beverages available today. Fred has over 50 years of experience sourcing fruit and making juice products in order to create fully natural products that are a blend of har- vests from different countries in order to maintain a consistent pleasing taste and colour throughout the year. “We not only produce our own brand juices, here at Keeling Juices we’re proud to supply household names in Ireland & the UK with products under their own label. From our national airline to countrywide supermarket chains and cafés, our juices have been stimulating taste buds with the fresh tastes of nature for over twenty years.” “Almost every product we make is contained in some bottle or other. Our contract manufacturing means that we had to store stacks of pallets of bottles according to the needs of our client’s products. From HDPE jugs to all differ- ent types of PET bottles with different neck finishes the management of the packaging stock was a massive unre- warding chore which not only took up valuable warehouse space with empty bottle space, but also tied up a lot of capital in stock with the risk of the stock becoming out of date through product discontinuation.” “Our meeting with FlexBlow (Tere- kas) happened quite by accident – through an old email address belong- ing to a brand we had inadvertently acquired. However, after the meeting it became immediately apparent how PET bottle blowing could fit in our business. We had a fairly predictable usage of bottles for our own products and a growing requirement from clients to allow for different bottles for spe- cific projects. Our usage justified the purchase of a bottle blowing system, however this is still a new area for us and the next hurdle was to find the best, most reliable partner for PET blowing equipment. There is plenty of choice out there and it could have taken us years to understand all the options and decide on the best equipment on offer. As we were looking for the possibility to pro- duce a wide range of bottles from 100ml to 5,000ml with different neck stand- ards, and easy bottle format change – FlexBlow answered our needs per- fectly. We were losing money through outsourced bottles and our clients’ needs were expanding all the time. We validated FlexBlow as a partner by visit- ing some of their client sites in Europe and from this we took away the good impression that FlexBlow continued to work with and support their clients for many years. “ “Now that we have the blowmould- ing machine installed, it has become clear that there is a huge sustainability benefit to this system. We had been importing bottles from the UK and the Netherlands with trucks and ships carry- ing empty space bottles. Now the ship- ments are reduced by many factors as we are only importing the more compact preforms. The reduction in transport brings a financial and environmental benefit that helps us meet our targets for sustainability and reassure our cus- tomers that we are always re-evaluating what we do to be more planet-friendly. Not only have we reformed our own bottle usage, we now have an opportu- nity to serve the local market and thus reduce the imports and the transporta- tion of empty bottles from abroad.” www.keelingjuices.com www.flexblow.com