A major sports drink manufacturer contacted Brenton to retrofit a packaging line in one of its facilities because the original line supplier was no longer in business. Brenton agreed to fix their line which also gave the opportunity to show them Brenton’s extensive packaging and integrating capabilities. The customer was impressed, and days after the retrofit was completed, they asked Brenton to build a similar, but much larger scale, packaging line for another facility.
The customer, at the request of wholesale club stores, needed to take all single flavor sports drink shrink wrapped trays, sort the drinks by flavor and repackage them into multi flavor shrink wrapped trays. They needed a fully automated system in order to keep up with the volume demand from the retailers, desire for rainbow packs from customers, and also for quality reasons as they needed to automatically track inventory through the mixing and re-palletizing process.
Brenton created a system operating at speeds up to 70 trays per minute, increasing capacity by 30% and adding the ability to track products through the entire repacking process. The system utilized robots with clamp-style tools to remove an entire layer of trays of the sports drink, take off the shrink wrap, use vision technology to resort the drinks into multi flavor shrink wrapped trays, and palletize and stretch wrap the trays for shipment. The new line replaced over 100 people and had an 18 month ROI.
