That's when the firm switched its 1-liter format from a brick pack to an aseptic gabletop carton with a reclosable screw cap.
Sold throughout Ireland, Batchelors codes five flavors of the shelf-stable product for nine months, just as it did with its previous brick pack. Kieran Rumley, Batchelors' marketing director, says the main advantages of the new carton relate to consumer convenience. The company conducted consumer testing to determine an ideal carton to replace the former 1-L brick, "which we felt was old and inconvenient," he says. "The screw cap carton is easy for consumers to hold, pour and store. It's been tremendously successful in the market."
Elopak supplies the approximately 22-pt carton, which includes an inner low-density polyethylene sealant layer/ Surlyn®/aluminum foil/Surlyn/paperboard/inks/LDPE coating. The board is printed by gravure in six colors.
Batchelors forms, fills and seals cartons on a US-80-A aseptic machine from Elopak (New Hudson, MI). According to Elopak, Batchelors is the first company in Europe to use this version of the machine, which is unusual in that it applies an injection-molded polypropylene screw cap in-line. The cap is applied after carton forming, filling and sealing.
Batchelors sells the 1-L cartons as singles and in multipacks. In the case of the three-pack shown here, filled and sealed cartons discharge from the US-80-A machine and are grouped in sets of three by a machine supplied by Norpapp Eng. (Baerums Verk, Norway). The machine applies a convenient top carrying handle and bottom paperboard strip to unify the multipack, which, Rumley says, "has become a substantial part of our market."
Norpapp supplies the handle, which is printed in four colors plus varnish, as well as the paperboard strip. The strip covers up the UPC codes on the three individual carton bottoms so that only the UPC code on the multipack handle is scanned at the checkout.
