Wine, rather

With wine becoming the investment of choice among brewers, Lion Nathan decided to follow the general trend. In May the Tasman brewer bought a 13.5% stake in the wine company Montana Group, New Zealand’s biggest wine group, for about A$55 million. Montana, which has a dual listing on the New Zealand and Australian stock exchanges, holds more than 35% of the NZ wine market.
In August, Lion Nathan said it intended to raise the stake by 5% to 25%. The announcement came amid speculation that Lion Nathan only raised its stake to block Foster’s Brewing Group, which had also eyed up Montana. There had been a rumour as early as last year that Foster’s might offer up to A$485 million for Montana..

Increased machine availability and improved labelling quality New generation of cold-glue labellers

Breweries and beverage producers alike invest a great amount of money in printed and TV advertising to present their products and to give them top ranking. The sales packaging itself must consequently not lag behind these expectations. Today’s markets demand perfect bottle dressings. Proper positioning of all labels on the bottles, the product dressing, is assumed as a matter of course.

At the same time, operations are subjected to extreme internal rationalization pressure where efficient bottling is a major cost factor and changeover and servicing intervals are to be reduced to a minimum. Based on these criteria, KHS has developed a completely new line of cold-glue labellers that at is being introduced for the first time.
....

Cost of ownership Smaller or larger, which is more economical?

Whereas only a few years ago beer and soft drinks were being packed primarily in standardised returnable packs, nowadays we are seeing a definite trend towards highly differentiated dress and packaging options. Worldwide, non-returnable containers are on the advance. Increasingly varied packages and bottle dress ideas are required to support the marketing concepts involved.

These progressively more sophisticated wishes dreamed up by the marketing departments of course entail concomitantly tougher demands for the versatility of the bottling lines concerned. We have used a realistic example to determine how different line concepts affect the overall bottling costs: the occasionally surprising results are presented below.
....