BOTTLE MAKING 12 PETplanet Insider Vol. 23 No. 11/22 www.petpla.net Interview with Amelia Dales, Commercial Director, Packamama Bottles for the 21st century The original impetus behind Garçon Wines was the company’s focus on e-commerce friendly wine bottles. The result was the compact bottle shape, which is flat enough to be put through a letter box, and its PET format, which is light and robust enough for easy despatch. Behind the packaging concept and its manufacture is Packamama, the brand’s spin-off. PETplanet spoke to Amelia Dales, Commercial Director, about wine in PET, customer feedback and the focus on sustainability. PETplanet: At the beginning of the year, Packamama was created as a spin-off from Garçon Wines. What is behind the brand, which parts of the business are yours and which are Garçon Wines? Amelia Dales: Packamama had been in the works since the end of 2019, but with the onset of Covid-19, we decided to hold spinning off this business line under a new brand. The timing became right at the start of 2022 with the pandemic largely behind us and soon-to-launch collaborations on the horizon. Packamama encompasses the packaging elements of Garçon Wines, supplying dry goods and processing to pioneering wine companies, that is, our IPprotected eco-flat bottles, bottling and secondary packaging. As the business increasingly became focused on business-to-business packaging and collaborating with wine companies, it made little sense to continue with a legacy name that included ‘wines’ in the title. Garçon Wines will continue to operate separately and establish itself instead as a direct-to-consumer sustainable wine brand owner of brands that use eco-flat bottles and other more sustainable packaging formats in the future. The name Packamama was inspired by the earth goddess Pachamama, with a playful change in letter as we offer Packaging Protecting Mother Earth. This name far better aligns with our vision for a lower carbon future in drinks. Additionally, the name is liquid agnostic, which is important to us as Packamama will provide packaging for more than just wine in the future. PETplanet: What was the original impetus to package wine in recycled PET? Amelia Dales: The original impetus came from wanting to make a greater success of wine ecommerce, which in our view was hampered by an inefficient primary pack that was still in use from the 19th century. If you asked a group of intelligence people today to create an optimum packaging format for wine, a product that travels vast distances across the globe through complex supply chains, they would not have come up with a round, glass bottle. It’s a logistics nightmare due to being spatially inefficient, heavy and very fragile. Challenging the base assumptions that wine bottles need to be round and made from glass led to the creation of a bottle that is a flat, cross-section design of the shape consumers knows and love, and made from recycled PET (rPET) to save weight and energy. The functional benefits of PET include being lightweight and shatterproof, while still retaining glass-like qualities such as shine and transparency. PET is also the most widely recycled plastic on the planet, with capacity to make high quality products from its recyclate. Using 100% rPET from the outset was non-negotiable from an environmental perspective because of the importance of putting pre-existing material back to good use, limiting creation of new plastic and contributing to circular economies. Most importantly, as we more frequently see and feel the alarming impacts of the climate crisis, rPET is a more climate-friendly material to be using for wine, an industry whose carbon footprint hotspot comes from the glass bottle. rPET saves energy and weight in production, transport and recycling compared to both glass and virgin PET to slash carbon emissions and so is the best-in-class material for wines that don’t require bottle aging. PETplanet: Are there plans to expand into other beverage segments such as sparkling wine or beer? Amelia Dales: We’re starting in wine because packaging represents a carbon footprint hotspot and the single greatest impact producers can make in reducing their carbon emissions is to change the bottle. We also specifically designed our bottles to pay homage to the tradition and beauty of Amelia Dales, Commercial Director at Packamama by Gabriele Kosmehl
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