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Jolt relaunch is 'electric'

After 20 years, Wet Planet reintroduces Jolt in a 23.5-oz aluminum resealable can decorated with thermochromic inks.

Pw 11856 Jolt

The JOLT Battery Bottle™ is now providing an electric sales charge to retailers and foodservice operators that offer the new package. The new container is the result of a wide-ranging partnership of companies, including Rexam Beverage Can Americas, Dayton Systems Group, and contract packager Pri-Pak.

Jolt, now 20 years old, is the first commercial product to use Cap Can™ technology exclusively available through Rexam. In the process, Rexam makes the aluminum can body at its Whitehouse, OH, can plant, which also prints the cans with thermochromic inks. The can bodies then go to Dayton Systems Group, which applies to the can the patented Cap Can dome end, made of aluminum from Arco Aluminum. Cans and aluminum lug-style caps are then shipped to Pri-Pak, where the packaging line fills the cans through the dome with the carbonated drink, applies the caps, and adds a shrink band for tamper evidence.

“Jolt is a cultural icon, permanently sewn into the American fabric,” said CJ Rapp, president and chief executive officer of Wet Planet Beverage, Rochester, NY. “As America’s most powerful cola with ‘twice the caffeine,’ Jolt proved that people wanted more instead of less. As a result, Jolt started a trend for value-added products, and it became the catalyst for the emerging category now called New Age beverages.”

The new container has been in Wet Planet’s plans for about 18 months. “We brought to Rexam a project to create the Battery Bottle,” Rapp says. “They told us they were developing the Cap Can technology. So while we developed the concept internally, we collaborated with Rexam and DSG in adapting our ideas to the container they were developing.”

More bottle than can

“This is really a fusion between a bottle and a can,” says Steve Wirrig, vice president of marketing for Rexam BCA. “Automatically, it comes across as a beverage can—one of the most common containers—then the consumer sees the resealability function of the cap. So it’s not just novel, but functional, and that’s what consumers tell us they want.”

Pri-Pak fills the new can like a bottle on what has become an extremely versatile filling line in its Lawrenceburg, IN, plant. Wirrig says that Rexam’s Technical Services Group worked with Pri-Pak to convert an existing filling line for this container. That line, originally used for glass and plastic containers, now can also fill these aluminum containers. Pri-Pak ended up with a bottling line that’s probably one of the most flexible lines in the country, if not the world, says Wirrig. Pri-Pak declined requests for interviews.

The modifications and additions to the filling line were significant and more time consuming than originally expected. As Wirrig explains, Pri-Pak is a contract packager, so its lines need to be more flexible than dedicated lines for carbonated soft drinks.

Although many of the machines in the filling line were modified to run this container, two were added. Rexam worked with Alcoa CSI to develop a cap applicator, and a shrink bander for TE was added as well.

“We selected Alcoa to develop the cap applicator,” Wirrig says. “Footprint was a major consideration, and Alcoa had a solution that worked for us and for Pri-Pak. A lot of development went into a particular mechanism that holds the can while the cap is being applied.”

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