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Bud Talks Multipacks, OEM Payment Terms, and Can/Bottle Mix

Ken VonderHaar, Global Director, Can Division at Anheuser-Busch, works closely with OEM and machine builder partners. Packaging World visited Anheuser-Busch headquarters recently as part of PMMI’s Roadshow Series, hosted by nearby Barry-Wehmiller, and sat

Ken VonderHaar, Global Director, Can Division at Anheuser-Busch
Ken VonderHaar, Global Director, Can Division at Anheuser-Busch

Packaging World:
You do both a high volume in glass and a high volume of cans. How do you balance the mix?

Ken VonderHaar:
The mix shifted a lot during COVID-19, where we had about 40% glass and 60% cans, and some percentage was kegs. And of course, during pandemic, all the bars and venues shut down, so a lot more people were taking their 30-packs of cans home. That shifted the mix a little bit more, to higher than 60% cans, but predominantly cans are the higher volume. Cans are continuing to trend up in volume. They were even before the pandemic, and COVID-19 accelerated that. It looks like cans are going to be the biggest growth package for us moving forward.

You cited that 40% of your workforce is of an age that could potentially retire at any time. Given a tightening labor market (and it’s only getting tighter), what are you asking of your machine builder and OEM partners in terms of how they design their machinery, and how accessible they make their machinery?
Essentially, we’re asking for simplicity. We would like for all of the complexity to be under the hood, and we would like an operator interface that’s very simple, that’s easy to understand, and that our younger employees are able to interface with via some type of video screens. We also look for set-up procedures that are built into the operator screen. And we’d love it if they could help with training our operators to do that, also.

Would you allow your machine builder to remotely manage your equipment on the plant floor?
It’s always a challenge with our IT team to remote into anything in the brewery. And that’s just because of the risk. I think the trend is there, and we have to figure out how to do that. And at the end of the day, yes, we want to do that. We need to figure out how to do that safely and try to do it in a manner that doesn’t put our operations at risk. We [currently] do that on some of our equipment, but it’s very limited, and it is on equipment that it’s not accessible to the whole network. So, we will have to figure out how to do that more with the packaging machinery providers.

When do you bring your machine builder partners into the internal conversations about sustainability, whether it’s energy efficient machines or new materials?
There are two efforts that we’re undertaking with regards to energy efficiency and sustainability.

One is to make the current operation more sustainable and more energy efficient. And we absolutely need our equipment suppliers to come in and help us figure out how to minimize compressed air usage, how to reduce gas usage, and how to limit electricity usage. That is the first step.

But to your point, we are approaching our new projects with earlier involvement with the suppliers and more of a partnering mindset than we have in the past. Back then, it was really a lump sum, competitive bid type of operation. And we still will do some of that. But in some of the more complex jobs, we will start choosing partners to deal with and then start figuring out what those machines look like to maximize flexibility, minimize complexity, have the training documentation in place, and, again, make the machine as simple as possible.

You mentioned that you are doing some new things with rainbow packs or variety packs. Tell us about your early experiences, cutting your teeth with new multipack lines, and what the balance of that will look like going forward, between doing it yourself, versus hiring it out to contract packing.
We’ve installed two lines now that will make a variety pack. And, of course, a variety pack translates to a lot of SKUs that we have to run. We spent years studying what’s the right way to try to install a variety pack line. Do you depalletize, or palletize, a bunch of product for days and days? And you only make a brand change every three or four days on the filler, and then you mix it together?

The answer, we found out, was that wasn’t really the right solution from an economics perspective. What we’ve chosen to do is make lines with large, full-can accumulation systems on them. About every four hours, we will convert from Flavor A to Flavor B, and C, and D. And then once we’re running Flavor D, we will merge the other three flavors together into the packer and put them together into a variety pack.

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