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Variety-pack box reveals four 22-oz glass bottles inside

Corrugated four-pack offers market differentiation as well as material and transportation savings for the Craft Brew Alliance.

Pw 42585 Widmer1

To help build brand equity and drive sales, makers of spirits, wine, and other alcoholic beverages employ both structural and graphic design elements, using package shapes, labels, and other decorative methods to create shelf appeal for their primary packages.


That strategy is also employed by the Portland-based Craft Brew Alliance for its Red Hook Brewery, Kona Brewing Company, Omission Beer, and Widmer Brothers Brewing beer brands. But for a new variety pack that carries up to four different Widmer beers, each in 22-oz glass bottles, CBA also uses secondary packaging to provide a structural and graphics marketing punch that helps sell the brews, primarily in club and liquor stores. The roughly $20 variety pack debuted last August.


These boxes were created specially for CBA by its vendor xpedx, a business of International Paper. IP makes the 32-ECT, B-flute pack, which measures 11 3⁄16 in. H x 5 13⁄16 in. square. Litho-printed in four colors, the box includes die-cuts on all four sides that function as windows, curving around all four corners to allow customers to see all the bottles inside the box. At this point, two Widmer varieties—Nelson Imperial IPA and Pitch Black IPA—are sold in the pack, but CBA has the option of selling four different varieties within the four-pack.


The glass bottles are supplied by O-I. Widmer uses a 72-head rotary filler to fill them on its glass line in Portland that also accommodates 12-oz longneck and stubby bottles. Once the 22-oz bottles are filled, labeled, crowned, etc., they’re placed in unmarked cases and sent to nearby xpedx for manual filling into the hand-erected cases.


CBA’s needs
According to Kyle Jennings, senior director, supply chain with CBA, “We’ve used xpedx on and off for three years here in Portland for basically anything out of the norm. This was a prominent project. We had a concept to market up to four different varieties of our larger 22-ounce bottled beer, but we didn’t want to create different packaging for the different beers. We wanted more of a ‘universal’ pack. And, we wanted it to be different. So we worked with xpedx to develop this pack.”


For the Widmer pack, CBA sought bottles visible within the box to consumers, a box that would be easy to carry, yet sturdy enough to hold the 9.5 lb of combined product and packaging. CBA also needed assistance in assembling the box and repacking product into the variety pack before sending it back to CBA for nationwide distribution.

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