Pressure-sensitive labeller for Barossa brewery

When the South Australian-based Barossa Brewery, a boutique brewery that specialises in satisfying niche markets, needed to upgrade to a new pressure-sensitive labeller for applying labels to its 375 mL bottles - both front and rear of the neck - the CEO Denham D'Silva embarked on an exhaustive testing program. It included testing the machine on line, before settling on a purchase decision.

There were three issues that took the labelling job away from the straightforward category: one being the issue of condensation on the bottles, the second the application of labels neatly to a tapered neck and the third being the somewhat infrequent use of the labeller. The brewery's labelling requirements, on average, equate to 12,000 bottles a day.

"We are currently running the line relatively slowly, at around 50/min, but we expect to speed up the line and run at a rate of 100/min when we are in full production. We did have some initial teething problems but soon got on top of them," said Denham.

Bubbling of labels was one of the early problems if the label was skewed and creased, when applied to the tapered neck.

But, it was two key issues that helped Barossa brewery to select the Tronics Series 3 label applicator - the local presence of Tronics, down the road in Adelaide, for backup and service and the preparedness of Tronics to let Barossa test the machine on the line in the plant.

"This enabled us to go through exhaustive trials with the machine - and also carry out a thorough testing of different label types under the not-so-easy conditions - the tapered neck, some condensation and irregular usage of the machine," explained Denham.

There used to be an earlier problem with labels bubbling but now, with the Tronics labeller installed and finetuned, there is not a problem.