Typically Swiss

A visit to GlaxoSmithKline’s Coleford site, near Gloucester in the UK, involves a few striking contrasts. Not the least of these is the way that a factory first occupied 60 years ago houses some of the most modern and sophisticated filling equipment in the world.

There are eight bottle-filling lines, five carton- filling lines and one line for Guala laminate pouches on the site. Many of the products, including Ribena and Lucozade, are non-carbonated. But carbonated variants such as Lucozade Energy are also filled there.

Unit volumes in PET bottles go from 33cl and 38cl up to 1.25 litres for the ready-to-drink (RTD) products. Ribena squash concentrate is also filled at Coleford, this time in bottle sizes of between 60cl and 2 litres.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is particularly proud (and rightly so) of its three cold aseptic filling lines on the Coleford site. The most recently installed of these is a Krones PETAsept line, put in just two years ago, and typically used to fill the various Ribena fruit juice drinks into PET bottles. Project manager Gene Brown explains: “Since we have eliminated preservatives from our fruit-based products, we have had to move to aseptic filling in order to maintain shelf life.” The Krones line usesIt’s no surprise to learn that Coca-Cola is the most popular carbonated soft drink in Switzerland, but I bet there aren’t many people who’d be able to correctly guess the runner-up.

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Reprinted from The Filling Business © February 2008