By Laszlo Kerekes
The principal corporate focus at the Hungarian beverage producer Gramex 2000 is not house brands, but developing private label beverages and contract bottling. This philosophy has served the company well over the past 10 years. The firm has opted for several small bottling lines which allow for plenty of and are less investment-intensive.
The most recent kit to be installed by Gramex is a complete Kosme carbonated soft drinks (CSD) line for non-returnable PET. This means the mid-tier company has capability for bottling carbonated beverages as private labels or as contract bottling jobs.
It was not in the year 2000 as the name might seem to indicate, but in fact one year earlier that the Hungarian Gramex 2000 began to sell electrolyte powder for athletes under the brand-name of Vitalade.
Realising the popularity, the advantages, and the opportunities offered by bottled ready-to-drink beverages, a year later Gramex had the Vitalade sport beverage products bottled in PET containers, featuring sportscaps in Hungary for the first time.
The demand for the firm’s own sports beverages grew swiftly, and by the second year the production capacity already had to be increased.
In 2006, Gramex again upsized its bottling capabilities, tripling them to as many as 650 pallets a day.
The machinery once again included a Kosme labeller and, for the first time, a Kosme stretch blow-moulding machine, a palletiser and a pallet wrapper, in conjunction with machines from other manufacturers. But even this capacity did not suffice for long.
In 2008, Gramex increased its production area with a 6,500 sqm hall and ordered a KSB 6R rotary blow-moulding machine from Kosme, plus a Palpack PS palletiser and a Volpack pallet wrapper.
At the same time, it began to export its dealer’s brands products to Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Italy.
In the initial stage of expansion, proprietor János Gréczihad already identified the trend towards dealer’s brands on the international markets but did not have the capital required to push his house brands with maximised vigour.
In 2004, he received his first order from Metro, and developed the lowprice brand “Gratis”, which was sold on the shelves of the food and beverage hypermarket.
Later on, Coop, Carrefour, Tesco and other chain stores became customers.
In all, Gramex supplies just under a dozen supermarket chains in Hungary and six adjoining countries.
About 70 percent of the output is accounted for by private labels, 20 percent by contract bottling and the remaining 10 percent by house brands.
“Looking back, this decision in favour of private labels and contract bottling was the right one,” says Mr Gréczi.
In order to progress this trend, in 2009 Gramex installed an aseptic line rated at 12,000 1.5-litre PET bottles an hour.
There are only four aseptic lines up and running at Hungarian facilities, two of them being large Krones lines at an internationally operating soft-drinks producer, and one of Italian manufacture at a fruit-juice plant.
Gramex is the only firm offering aseptic contract bottling of juices and still beverages without any preservatives in PET containers with screw caps or 38mm sportscaps in sizes from 0.33 to 1.5 litres.
Gramex changed its investment strategy and in 2011 installed its first complete line from Kosme.
The PET line for soft drinks, the one that has enabled Gramex to become a player in the CSD market, is dimensioned for an output of 12,000 containers an hour, referenced to the 1.5 litre bottle.
The line incorporates a Synchroblock with a monobloc-synchronised filler and a KSB 6R rotary stretch blow-moulding machine, followed by a drying tunnel upstream of the Rollstar wraparound labeller.
End-of-the-line packaging, as shrink-packs with three-times-two or three-times-four containers without pads or trays wrapped in transparent or printed films, is handled by a Kosme Flypack packer.
When they leave the hall, the multi-packs are passed to a Palpack PS palletiser, which loads half-pallets and euro-pallets that are then fed to a Volpack pallet wrapper.
“This complete new line from Kosme made things very simple for me,” says technical director János Vogel.
“We’re now using the line in 24-hour mode four to five days a week, and measuring an efficiency of 85 percent to 90 percent.
“The monobloc layout, with the air conveyors eliminated, has meant shorter buffering sections, which require correspondingly less maintenance. We get the spares from a single source in the shape of Kosme, which makes many things a whole lot easier,” he emphasises.
Gramex now possesses a total of four lines. The first two of them, rated at 8,000 and 10,000 bottles an hour respectively and featuring two Kosme linear blowmoulding machines and one Kosme rotary blow-moulding machine, are used mainly for producing the company’s housebrands. The third one, the 12,000-bph aseptic line, and the fourth one, the new 12,000-bph line from Kosme, are where the private-label and contract bottling orders are run.
