Dairy Crest invests in production for Tesco flavoured milk

Dairy Crest has invested in two complete packaging lines for Tesco own-label flavoured milk at its Dagenham site. Both lines were installed by Hampshire-based Allied Pharma Machinery (APM), which will complete on-the-job training for the second line this week.

The flavoured milk was launched in June with a manual packaging line, but strong sales demanded a more efficient packaging technique. “The brief from Dairy Crest was ‘high flexibility to change bottles frequently’,” said APM director Andrew Bannister. The lines can turn out 100 bottles a minute, which are packed into collations of sixes and tens. The machinery caters for six different sizes of plastic bottle, ranging from 250ml to one litre.

Bottle unscrambling machines, bottle orientation units and bottle air rinse systems were supplied by US firm Pace Packaging, while Italian firm Sotemapack provided automatic collation and tray loading systems. Each line was installed over a weekend to avoid disrupting production.