Lao Brewery Company, Laos
Not one but three new lines
KHS is installing not one but three new filling lines for long-standing customer the Lao Brewery Company (LBC) at its sites in Vientiane and Pakse. The new line at the plant in the Lao capital of Vientiane outputs 32,000 cans per hour. At LBC’s ultramodern second plant in the south of the country KHS is setting up two PET lines with energy-saving stretch blow molders and filling technology for 22,000 soda pop and 45,000 water bottles per hour.
All three lines are equipped with KHS Kisters packaging machines, which give LBC top quality and the utmost flexibility for future variants. Another advantage is that the client can swap spare parts between machines on the various lines.
With a market share of 98%, LBC is the market leader in Laos. The brewery’s flagship is the Beerlao brand. Incidentally, with a yearly per capita consumption of 32 liters, Laos’ beer consumption is roughly on par with that of France. The Lao Brewery Company started out in 1973 as the Lao Beer and Ice Factory, a joint venture run by a number of Lao entrepreneurs and foreign investors. At that time, the company produced three million liters of beer and 1.5 million liters of carbonated beverages in Vientiane. The company was nationalized at the end of 1975 and now makes 210 million and 21 million liters respectively per annum.
In 1993 new investors enabled LBC to expand its production capacities and marketing activities. In 2002, the Asian subsidiary of Denmark’s Carlsberg Group joined the company, gradually increasing its shareholding to 51% by 2011. In May 2008 the Lao Brewery Company opened a second facility with state-of-the-art machinery in Pakse in the province of Champasak close to the Thai border. This plant has a current capacity of 50 million liters per year, with the possibility of expanding this to 200 million liters. In addition to beer, LBC also produces carbonated beverages and soda pop under license for Pepsi Co (Pepsi, Miranda, and 7 Up) and Tigerhead mineral water. The company employs a total of around 1,100 people at its two plants.
Bowen & Bowen/Coca-Cola, Belize
Excellent result
In Ladyville, a suburb of the Caribbean port town of Belize City, KHS is equipping the bottling plant of Bowen & Bowen with an ultramodern bottle washer (including an integrated label remover) that washes up to 28,000 bottles per hour ranging in size between 237 milliliters (8 fl oz) and 1.0 liter. Not only can the bottle washer be easily adapted to different bottle shapes, it also offers the additional flexibility of being able to process both soft drink and beer bottles.
Thanks to minimized heat and liquid carryover and a pump control to reduce the pressure in standby mode, this future-proof machine is characterized by particularly low energy consumption. Triple-i-Drive technology increases machine availability by continuously synchronizing all motors, thereby preventing faults and machine downtimes and resulting in noticeably less maintenance work.
The scheduling is especially critical for this project. For logistic reasons Coca-Cola Belize can only interrupt production for a maximum of five consecutive days. Careful planning of on-site installation has ensured that the popular beverages are available throughout the country at all times. KHS has been working with Bowen & Bowen for many years and has always been the company’s first choice for its bottling lines. Bowen & Bowen is a market leader in Belize.
Cervecería Centro Americana, Guatemala
Turnkey system for Central America
Cervecería Centro Americana (CCA) recently awarded KHS a contract for a turnkey project in Guatemala City based on KHS’ impressive recent performance installing a similar facility at CCN, an affiliate of CCA in Nicaragua. The line is to bottle and pack 90,000 cans per hour.
It is comprised of a volumetric can filler, a double-deck tunnel pasteurizer with high-precision PU control, a tray shrink packer, various inspection units and a bulk depalletizer and palletizer equipped with two KUKA robots. The line can work with three different can formats and is thus extremely flexible. It can also be adjusted to various sizes and types of packaging with very short downtimes.
The attractive features this pasteurizer offers customers include exceptionally low water consumption in addition to energy-saving drives, both of which make it possible for customers to reduce their ongoing production costs considerably. The FullyEnclosed FilmPack packaging option also saves CCA packaging material and helps to make products more environmentally friendly.
Cervecería Centro Americana is a long-established, traditional company in the Central American state of Guatemala. It was founded by two brothers in 1886 and has since been owned by the family. Despite tough competition the company has managed to assert its market leadership in Guatemala and enjoys very close ties to its homeland. KHS machines have tradition here.
Brandenburger Urstromquelle, Baruth
Sign of trust
As in the past Brandenburger Urstromquelle again went for tried-and-tested technology from KHS when recently investing in a new stretch blow molder, filler, and shrink packer. The new machines are destined for a line, which mainly fills carbonated soft drinks such as water and apple spritzer into half-liter bottles.
Including its most recent InnoPET Blomax Series IV, designed for a capacity of 63,000 PET bottles per hour, the company now has a total of seven KHS stretch blow molders. Three are the new Series IV, one of which Brandenburger Urstromquelle was one of the first customers to test as far back as in 2009. This repeat order is clear proof that the mineral water bottling plant in Baruth in Germany is convinced by the machine’s considerable energy savings, reduced consumption of materials and optimum line efficiency.
The company also very specifically opted for the Innofill DRV PET filler, a computer-controlled, volumetric filler with 192 filling stations, which can process both still and carbonated beverages.
Concerning its Innopack Kisters SP Advanced shrink packer the experts at Brandenburger Urstromquelle and the team at KHS drew up a concept which was directly implemented in the new equipment. The resource-conserving advantages resulting from this concept include a reduced use of film and the consequential lower cost of materials.
Pivara Trebjesa, Montenegro
Great prospects
KHS is delivering to Trebjesa Brewery located in Nikšić, the second largest city in Montenegro a bottle filler designed to process various bottle formats and sizes ranging from a quarter to a half liter at a capacity of up to 40,000 bottles per hour in addition to a pad shrink packer with a nominal capacity of 60 packs per hour matching that of the filling line.
By replacing its existing machines, which were over 20 years old, the customer is not only boosting availability but also considerably cutting costs for operation and maintenance. The new machines are easy to operate, quick to convert, and save on packaging materials. Using the new Innofill Glass DPG-ZMS with 108 filling valves greatly optimizes the filling capacity. The glass bottler combines the system properties of a robust mechanical filling system with all the benefits of pneumatically controlled valves.
Pivara Trebjesa was founded in 1896 and now belongs to the Molson Coors Central Europe brewery group, which is headquartered in Prague in the Czech Republic. Montenegro’s only brewery is the country’s market leader and holds a 90% share of the market. It produces four styles of beer, which are also exported to its neighboring countries: Nikšićko pivo, Nik Gold, Nik Cool and Nikšićko tamno. The brewery also bottles several beers for the Molson Coors Group.
