Coding upgrade at Schweppes

Schweppes Australia hold nearly a quarter of the carbonated soft drink market, with a portfolio consisting of owned and franchised brands, including Schweppes, Solo, Spring Valley, Cool Ridge and Cottee’s, plus the local licence to make Pepsi and Gatorade.

Typical of FMCG production, Schweppes needs reliability in every aspect of its filling lines. It also needs to meet its customers’ coding requests.

A year ago, the company upgraded 2 L and 1.25 L PET lines.

Ian Houlder, Senior Project Engineering Manager with Schweppes, says, “We needed to comply with our customers’ requirements, with regard to SSCC and having labels applied on opposite sides of a pallet.”

Already having a number of existing Fox IV units from Matthews in both SSCC and TUN applications, Houlder says they then did a full review of Avery units (supplied by Matthews), along with equipment from three other vendors.

“We did a matrix of all the different features and benefits of each machine, weighed it, scored it and the Avery units came out on top,” Houlder says.

“Then, because Matthews was an existing supplier to us, we did an evaluation of them as an after-sales service provider. They passed well.”

Schweppes installed 28 ALS 204s from Matthews — two per filling line — in seven factories, across five states; each printer is positioned just after the packing machine.

Houlder says the ability to integrate the Matthews equipment into a fully networkable coding system was a feature.

It also has some future scope for Schweppes.