Beverage manufacturer’s innovative approach pays off

For anyone who grew up in Melbourne, Slades’ home-delivered soft drinks are an institution.

Established in 1867, the company traded as O’Neil Brothers Soft Drinks until 1930 when the beverage producer took on Slades as its moniker. Today the company is run by the Tan family, who took over in 2001.

“The first 12 months after we took over were hard,” said George Tan. “There were quality issues, inconsistency with product. We had to change all of that. We looked at the manufacturing process and improved it.”

The Tans built new warehouses with new manufacturing equipment, moved to plastic bottles and started a new line. At the time, the Slades business wasn’t strong enough to sustain the business, so they started to pack for retailers including ALDI.

George and Ben Tan in front of their automated line that packs soft drinks into CHEP's Multi-Purpose Beverage Trays.

“Before we worked with ALDI, our practice was to use only cardboard cartons. ALDI wanted to eliminate cardboard cartons by using the CHEP Multi-Purpose Beverage Tray and Display Pallet. From our point of view it was a good move. Using the Beverage Tray we do not have wastage through damage from cartons,” said George.

“Also, when using cartons you need different cartons with different barcodes for different flavours; with the CHEP Multi-Purpose Beverage Tray and Display Pallet, you can visibly see what flavour it is - and we do 10 different flavours for ALDI. It saves costs because it eliminates the need to print different cartons and also saves us time because we don’t have to stop the line to change cartons.

“Using the Multi-Purpose Beverage Tray and Display Pallet, we have improved line speeds by at least 50% - it’s very impressive actually. Our products have to get out of the door quickly and now we can run four different flavours in a day without stopping the line.”

The palletising line is programmed to pack to CHEP Display Pallet footprint and Multi-Purpose Beverage Tray.

Slades installed a new line to meet the demand for its third-party retail orders. The process is largely mechanised and works seamlessly with the CHEP Multi-Purpose Beverage Tray and Retail Display Pallet.

A robot picks up 48 bottles, the number that fills two Multi-Purpose Beverage Trays, and places them on the tray. Two robots then pick up the trays and stack them on a Display Pallet (which is exactly the size of two Multi-Purpose Beverage Trays and one third of the footprint of a standard wooden CHEP pallet). When the stack reaches five high it moves down the line for wrapping.

The process is twice as fast as hand-stacking, achieving an average output of 100,000 bottles a day.

“Initially we had some difficulties, particularly around transport. I wanted to know how it was going to work, but CHEP eliminated a lot of those concerns. The Display Pallet is one third of the size of a standard CHEP pallet so we are still able to maximise our loads,” George said.

In modular terms, six Display Pallets fit the same footprint as two wooden CHEP pallets. Australian truck trailers are designed to be two CHEP pallets wide.

“Installing the new line has been worth it,” George said. “The robots can pack all of the ALDI bottles into a Multi-Purpose Beverage Tray then onto Display Pallets; and where we still use cartons for some customers, it can also automatically pick up and stack them onto a traditional CHEP pallet. Previously this was a very manual process. We can switch from cartons to Multi-Purpose Beverage Trays and Display Pallets anytime to meet our customers’ needs.

“Switching to using the Multi-Purpose Beverage Tray and Display Pallet opened up a market opportunity for us. When the soft drinks come off our line it’s a retail-ready product - it goes straight to the store - that’s what we really like about it,” George said.

“I like that there’s high visibility of the product. It’s just in your face. Customers can see the label and touch it, it just stands out. It’s going to save costs over conventional cartons from a manufacturing point of view and also we have learnt that it does increase sales.

“It’s a big investment but it’s a long-term prospect. We know over the next five to 10 years retailers will move into RRP (retail-ready packaging) - if you travel around Europe it’s all being packed into RRP. Our view is it’s better to do it now and be ready for the future.

“In the manufacturing world you have to be innovative and ready for change.”