Revving up production

Me and my factory: Paul Martin, Chief Engineer, Bottlegreen Drinks Co

I've been with Bottlegreen pretty much from the start. I joined 15 years ago when it was literally a cottage industry.

Shireen Morris, who started the company with her husband Kit, was filling bottles of elderflower cordial by hand, putting cork stoppers in and sticking labels on with Pritt.

Then they got a small industrial unit, just on the other side of Nailsworth from where we are now, and they did about 3,000 bottles in the first year there.

Now we're at Frogmarsh Mill, a former tannery in South Woodchester, and we're doing three times that number in an hour. That gives you an idea of how we've grown.

In the past 18 months we've completely changed our operating philosophy. We've put in a lot of automation, so our people are doing much less manual work and more quality checking and machine supervision. And we've also put in a massive new pasteuriser. That's meant completely rethinking the layout of the factory and has left us very cramped for space.

Until May 2004 we had two or three people hand-packing bottles of cordials and pressés into boxes at about 4,000-5,000/h. We put in two new bits of equipment from TMG in Italy -- an automatic box erector and auto packer -- and we're now packing at 10,000/h.

In the early days here the whole process was very manual, from offloading empty bottles to packing the finished product. We used to make up all the cartons by hand the day before and stack them on a mezzanine. Then in the morning someone would be up there, lobbing them down for us to fill. Now the bottles won't be touched from when they're unpacked to when they're palletised. So our manufacturing has changed from very hands-on to more plant management, machine supervision and quality checks.

That's given our people much more interesting jobs to do. They do a whole range of quality checks. Are the labels straight? Are the cap torques on spec? Are the carbonation levels correct? As our speeds increase, if something does get missed, it gets missed on a lot more bottles.

One of the most important things we installed last year was a SIG bulk glass depalletiser, which unloads complete layers of bottles automatically -- about 375 small bottles each time. It slides them on to a conveyor and they get shuffled down into a single lane for filling.

We've also changed bottle supplier. Our bottles are one of our points of difference -- even people who don't recall the Bottlegreen name know our skittle-shaped bottles -- and most of them have come from Gallo in Portugal. But they've just been taken over by a Spanish company that wants to scale down its exports. Gallo are still making our pressé bottles, but for the others we've moved to BSN. Theirs come in a different pallet format, and we're still learning our way round what needs to be changed.

This morning, the new depalletiser clipped the side of a stack of about 2,000 bottles and they went down like a house of cards. But that's part of the learning process. I've talked to the BSN agent, and some of the responsibility is ours, some of it's theirs.

From a production management point of view we had more changes in 2004 than at any point in our history. And our production manager, Graham Morris, was away on sabbatical with Operation Raleigh for three months. So it has been a very busy time! In fact, it has been non-stop change for the past year, and the next year looks much the same as we're just starting on a factory extension.

Since August, on every bit of machinery except the filler, all of the control systems have either been replaced or renewed. Four years ago we invested in a Krones MecaFill rinser/filler, which has a capacity of about 200 bottles per minute, and every other piece of equipment has been rated to match that.

But each change you make moves the pressure points to a different part of the line, and I'm just starting to put together a package for new machinery to go into the extension.

At the beginning, as a small company, Bottlegreen built itself on second-hand equipment. That's where a lot of my expertise came in. I did my apprenticeship in the Merchant Navy, as a marine engineer, and that's a good training because it's so broad. You're dealing with engineering, electronics, steam, hydraulics. I completed my apprenticeship, then went to Bath University as a mature student to do mechanical engineering, and then I worked as an engineer for a while with my father-in-law. We were working on paper converting machinery, and I travelled quite a bit, installing machinery in places like Nigeria.

So my background was in adapting machinery to get things running. But over the last few years my life has become a lot easier in that sense because we've been investing in new equipment. We plan to replace our old palletiser in the summer, and that was one of the last bits of second-hand machinery I bought.

We try to spend the money on the key pieces of equipment and do the linkages and the integration in-house. We invested £250,000 in the pasteuriser, and I had quotes of up to £110,000 for conveyors that feed bottles in to it. So I designed a conveyor system myself, we built it in-house and I wrote the program to integrate it. We saved about £60,000 doing it that way.

I see my role as first to stay one step ahead of sales and second to future-proof us, so that if a really fantastic contract comes up -- like the Duchy Originals own-label business we won last year -- we can accommodate it.

The pasteuriser was installed to handle the Duchy products. We were one of the very few soft drinks companies that didn't pasteurise. All our branded cordials and presses are cold-filtered to give them their shelf-life.

We blend juices and sugars with sterile water from our own bore hole, then we just pump the product through progressively smaller filters, and the final stage is through a pharmaceutical grade, 0.2 micron filter, which takes out the yeasts and the moulds that could cause spoilage.

Until relatively recently we did add a steriliser, benzoate, as belt-and-braces -- benzoate is something traditionally used in the wine trade and the consumer never bats an eyelid -- but our whole ethos is that we should do natural flavours without additives or preservatives. And with the Krones sterile filler giving us so much control, we decided it wasn't necessary.

But Duchy Originals wanted a cloudy product, and you obviously can't do that if you're filtering down to 0.2 microns. So we now fill those bottles in the normal way, then divert them to the pasteuriser for an hour or so before cartoning.

Bringing in that technology has enabled us to pick up other new business. We've just started producing a range for a Canadian supermarket chain. There are two grape juices, one apple and one apple and cranberry. They're all ready-to-drink, sparkling, organic products and, again, they wanted them pasteurised.

Elderflower is still 40-50% of the business in terms of our own flavours under the Bottlegreen brand. We still hand-pick the flowers and infuse them in a sugar syrup to extract the flavour naturally. But we also buy in concentrated and fresh pressed juices for ourselves, and we do lots of own-label too.

We are in a period of almost continuous development. There is a five-year plan, but it's being continually updated. It's the nature of the job that you have to be adaptable and responsive. We have got plans for a second filling line, but in two years we might need something completely different. Until 15 months ago, there was no talk of pasteurising. Who knows what's around the corner?

Interview by Mick Whitworth

Personal

Name: Paul Martin

Age: 45

Career highlights: Trained as marine engineer in the Merchant Navy, then took MSc in mechanical engineering at Bath. Worked as engineer in the paper converting sector before retraining as a teacher. Taught maths and science as head of department in secondary school for five years, then joined Bottlegreen 15 years ago. Now looks after overall factory operations and development, equipment purchasing, installation and integration.

Domestics: Lives 10 miles from the office with his wife and three sons.

Outside work: He's a motorcycling, saxophone- and guitar-playing, yoga and home improvement enthusiast who's also renovated an old cottage! "I was also learning Italian. But ironically I missed a lot of the classes because I was in Italy so often talking to suppliers."

Factory facts

Location: Bottlegreen Drinks Co, Frogmarsh Mill, South Woodchester, Gloucestershire GL5 5ET Tel: 01453 874000 http://www.bottlegreen.co.uk.

Main products: Branded and own-label premium cordials and sparkling pressés in flavours including elderflower, ginger & lemongrass and cranberry.

Turnover: £6m

Employees: 30

Blending capacity: 40,000 litres per day.

Bottling capacity: Currently running at 10,000 bottles per hour with scope to double that figure.