PACKAGING / PALLETISING PETplanet Insider Vol. 25 No. 03/24 www.petpla.net 40 Delta Engineering helps smooth the fl ow and boost effi ciency of new bottle blowing lines Delivering value – fast by Ruari McCallion Califia farms invested in automation to save time, cut costs and boost environmental performance in its growing non-dairy drinks production. When Californian company Califia Farms decided to install KHS automated bottle blowing lines, it was recommended to contact Belgian company Delta Engineering for its bottle conveying systems. Delta had recently opened a facility in Georgia, USA, so it was able to design a system that integrated smoothly with the preform stretch blow-moulding line and provide in-country expertise and support. The strongly rising demand for plant-based alternatives to dairy milk, such as oat, almond and coconut milk drinks, has seen Califia Farms grow rapidly in recent years. Non-dairy ready-to-drink coffee and creamer sales spiked nearly 50 per cent in 2021, compared with the year before, and plant-based milk products are up 25 per cent from pre-Pandemic levels. Against this background, Califia successfully placed a multi-million US Dollar funding round in 2020, part of which it put to good use in modernising and upgrading its main production facility, near Los Angeles, California. Environmental responsibility Califia was founded in 2010 by the late Greg Steltenpohl and is now led by CEO Dave Ritterbush, has always had a focus on environmental responsibility. It does not grow its raw materials but sources them as locally as it can. Over 80 per cent of the almond milk it buys are grown and processed within 20 miles of its bottling lines, for example. The investment in the new lines is another step on the road. “The project involves the complete transition of our facility’s bottling lines, from using pre-blown bottles to blowing our own on-site. The objectives were two-fold: to achieve cost savings and to reduce emissions,” said Tyler Crow, Senior Plant Engineer. “Previously, we used a depalletiser to feed our packaging lines with the preblown bottles. As our volumes grew, this became more and more expensive – we were receiving double-digit truckloads of empty bottles each week.” Califia now fills approaching 60 million bottles a year, selling them on to its major markets in Los Angeles, New York, other parts of the USA and further afield. Transporting 60 million preblown bottles is an expensive and environmentally insensitive way of, essentially, moving fresh air, although installing a preform blowing line could be seen as adding complexity to an operation that had previously been simply about mixing and filling. Objectives: cut traffic, cut carbon, cut costs and improve supply security “When we ran the numbers, it quickly became clear that we could save a lot of money and carbon emissions by blowing bottles from preforms here, on site. We would be able to get 90 per cent of those trucks off the road,” Tyler explained. The discussion of possible gains from automation and blowing onsite became more urgent during the Covid pandemic period, when reliability of bottle supplies was severely impacted across the whole food and beverage industry. In the USA and across the world. Califia handled the situation pretty well and was able to maintain fill and delivery schedules at 98 per cent, according to an Delta Engineering South Hall, Level 1 Booth S17061 Bottle Zone
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