BOTTLE MAKING 21 PETplanet Insider Vol. 25 No. 09/24 www.petpla.net from Bosnia Herzegovina. We were featured on TV and major news outlets and we found that distributors whose doors we had been knocking on for years were now calling us and wanting to do business.” For the next three years, English Mountain Spring Water grew at about 300% annually. That rate of growth is extremely hard to maintain and even to cope with but hard work and growing production lines enabled the company to capitalise and stabilise. It continued entering and gaining outstanding results at competitions across the world, including in Paris, France, where it won Bronze Medal three times in a row. There seems to be something special about its water, that it can compete with high-profile French brands in their own country. Natural goodness “Our source is a natural spring. We sit on about 145 acres (around 60 hectares) of land which is covered in virgin timber. The mountain is mostly limestone but there’s no hard water. It’s naturally alkaline – it comes out at about 7.8 pH – and there’s no industry close to us,” John continued. “The spring has what I would deem a perfect mineral blend. The key to water is having no taste; you don’t want it to leave an aftertaste, you want it to refresh you. Our slogan is ‘engineered by nature, bottled with perfection’; we say God made it, we just clean it up and put it in a bottle!” At many competitions, English Mountain was the only entrant that was packaging in PET and HDPE, rather than glass. Its early adoption of plastic packaging made it something of a pioneer. “A five-gallon (US) bottle made of glass is pretty heavy. It weighs in at around 80 pounds (36 kg) and it’s potentially dangerous. I met someone at a show who had a scar on his neck from a bottle that separated while he was carrying it. We decided early that we were not going to use glass, if it could be avoided.” Setting trends English Mountain’s five gallon bottles were made of PC (polycarbonate) and they deliberately went with clear plastic, rather than the fashionable cobalt tint, because they didn’t want customers to think they were hiding anything. PET was selected for smaller, eight-ounce (250ml equivalent) bottles, for presentation and flavour; John found that there was always a residual plasticky taste in foil-topped HDPE packages. Whether PCB or PET, the packages are lighter to transport than glass and there was hope that they would be recycled. “I looked at buying bottling lines at the time but the cost was just prohibitive,” he explained. “I went round a number of factories that bottled for Pepsi-Cola, for example, and I was advised that I needed an annual output of around 10 million units to make it worthwhile. That has always been my benchmark.” Stepping up a gear By 2017, English Mountain had reached 10 million/year and it was time to look seriously at blowing their own bottles. But John didn’t build up his company by rushing headlong into things and this was no exception. “There were some smaller units coming in from China but I was in contact with people who used them and had some bad experiences. As time went on, the equipment started to work better for small bottles and prices began to come down. That potential investment began to make more sense.” Apart from the economics of buying in, English Mountain was finding that quality and consistency of bought-in supplies was, increasingly, leaving something to be desired. There were too many failures and loss of product. It was getting expensive and was beginning to have a reputational impact. Flexblow came onto the scene at just the right time. “When their team came to see us, Gin was particularly impressed with how we manage our facility and he made clear that he wanted to make English Mountain Spring Water a showpiece. They listened to what we wanted, brought us a newly-designed moulder with preferential heating for a specific shape of bottle that I requested, and adapted their machine to suit. I decided that I could not pass up the opportunity and that’s when we pulled the trigger,” said John. The Flexblow Auto Quality line was installed in August 2023. It consists of a linear blow moulder, infeed system, compressor, chiller and fully automatic bulk packaging system. As its name suggests, it has fully automatic operational package: the operators simply input bottle parameters and the machine calibrates automatically. The machine also features integrated automatic quality assurance systems that eliminate any defective bottles, ensuring that only quality products proceed down the line. It is currently running in four-cavity format, producing 6,200 20-ounce (one Imperial pint or 568ml) containers per hour. It can also produce 12 fl oz/340ml packages at 6,000 to 6,200 bph. “Altogether we have six model sets: 12 fl oz, 20 fl oz, a couple of versions of 500ml and a 1 l. We have just ordered four more mould sets and we are bringing in tall and slender bullet bottles,” he said. “Our family of packages goes up to 1.5 l, all with 28mm neck finishes. But, with this machine, we can also run 38mm neck finish, which we can use with a one-gallon PET mould that we propose to roll out in the Fall of this year.” English Mountain Spring Water ran about 2.5 million bottles through the Flexblow machine from August to the end of 2023 and it is on track for five million before the end of July 2024.
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