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Clearly apart from the competition

Knowing it wasn’t the first to launch single-serve milks and juices in plastic bottles, this dairy made sure its new PET bottle would stand out and promote the brand.

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Claiming it’s been on the wish list for some time, Anderson Erickson Dairy of Des Moines, IA, recently launched a 12-oz single-serve plastic bottle for a line of fresh milks and juices called “Icy Cold To Go.” The 72-year-old family-owned dairy made sure that when its new product line hit store shelves, it wouldn’t be just a me-too item.

“We wanted a custom bottle that would set us apart from the competition,” says Miriam Erickson Brown, president and chief operating officer at AE. “We’ve spent years and years investing in our brand, and this is another one of those investments. We chose clear PET not only because we wanted consumers to be able to see the product, but also because to us, clear means fresh and cold.”

Grafco (Hanover, MD) played a key role, says Brown, in bringing the bottle to market quickly.

“We liked the feel of their company, which, like ours, is family-owned,” says Brown. “They were ready to meet our delivery requirements as well as accommodate our design ideas.”

Just 14 weeks after the project began, Grafco was producing commercial bottles for AE. Sending PDF files back and forth as e-mail attachments helped speed things up a lot, says Brown. “The Internet is great,” she adds.

Embossed shoulder

Weighing 24 g, the injection stretch/blow-molded bottle is distinguished by the stylized AE for “Anderson Erickson” embossed onto its shoulder in three different spots. This image is repeated immediately below in the label, supplied by MRI (Newtown, PA). The roll-fed, glue-applied label is 1.1-mil white opaque oriented polypropylene with a clear OPP adhesive-laminated over it. The white OPP is flexo-printed in up to eight colors. “We think the label has a nice combination of graphic impact and the ability to withstand a moist environment,” says Brown.

While Brown spearheaded the design side of the Icy Cold To Go project, brother Warren Erickson, chief financial officer, began touring various liquid filling plants to evaluate equipment. Just shy of $1 million later, Erickson assembled a filling line capable of 150 bottles/min. Anchoring the new line is a 28-head rotary filler from Federal Manufacturing (Milwaukee, WI).

“It has a fully computerized clean-in-place system that we really like,” says Erickson. “Chemicals, times, temperatures—everything is controlled automatically, so going from one product to another, like milk to orange juice, takes about half an hour.”

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