Project Profile: Veuve Clicquot toasts success with promo packing kit

Aim Set up packing line for ‘Design Box’

Spend More than Ä2m (£1.8m)

What New Cermex packing line

When July 2009

Targets Overseas markets

Challenge

Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin (VCP) is one of the world’s best-known champagne houses and one of a bevy of fizz producers belonging to luxury brand owner LVMH. In fact, its orange label is so iconic that the champagne was voted at number 13 in this magazine’s Most Admired Brands listing last year (Packaging News, November 2009).

Its winery, on the outskirts of the medieval town of Reims, is built in and above a network of 24km of underground chalk caves, which were dug out in Roman and medieval times to provide stone for the city walls. While the underground labyrinth of former mines is now the perfect environment in which to age champagne, a bottling line and three packing lines are housed in a busy production facility above ground.

In early 2008, VCP, which produces around 20m bottles of champagne every year, decided to replace one of the three packing lines. The line would initially be used to pack VCP’s newest promotional pack, the Design Box, a joint creation by the champagne house and supplier SCA Packaging and the latest in a series of premium promotional packs for Veuve Clicquot champagne.

Strategy

VCP approached a number of end-of-line machinery manufacturers with the project. Yorick Roullet, new project director at VCP, says: “Every element that could be automated had to be automated. The idea was to reduce human involvement in the process as much as possible.”

As well as maximising automation, the company wanted a high-speed system that would eliminate any scuffing and rough bumps to the upmarket Design Box packs and that would be adaptable to a range of packing configurations. It should also be able to handle new packs in the future, in particular a planned shelf-ready pack of six bottles that would require facing of both the presentation boxes and the bottles.

Cermex, the end-of-line firm that is part of Tetra Laval-owned Sidel, won the business. “We’d had three lines with Cermex before, so we knew the machines, and they provided the best-developed proposal,” says Rollet. “It also gave us confidence that they have a big R&D department.”

Implementation

Cermex came up with a line that, at full pelt, will pack as many as 8,500 bottles of Veuve Clicquot every hour. Three elements of the line were major advances from its predecessor: first, the heavy integration of robotics; second, the automation of format changeovers, which has cut times from more than two hours to less than 20 minutes; and an improvement in the protection of the bottles and their secondary packaging.

The line can handle 16 different formats of packing to accommodate producing corrugated cases of six or 12 bottles in a top-to-toe arrangement; these could be packed in Design Boxes or not; and could be in different bottles, including standard 75cl yellow-label, lightweight and special options, or the premium ‘Grande Dame’ shape.

Equipment in the installation includes a AN110 gantry packer, two Fanuc M710 50kg robots that have automatic gripping head changeover, an F272.40 tray erector, a WB45.80 wrap around case packer and a P4 palletizer.

One key element of the project was to eliminate scuffing of labels, the Design Boxes and secondary packaging. To this end, Cermex included features in the line that make sure the bottle’s label is never touched by the machinery; the presentation boxes are raised as they are transferred through certain parts of the line in order to avoid rubbing; and on the palletiser, trays are transferred using a step-by-step bracket conveyor.

A further difficulty was the tight space available in VCP’s packing facility; to overcome the problem, the 25m line is configured in a u-shape. The line went live in July 2009.

Results

VCP is now saving valuable time on format changeovers and says it has seen a marked drop in the number of damaged packs coming through its lines. In addition, it is considering how the line could help it bring future special edition packs to the market.

What’s more, as all three packing lines in VCP’s facility are now supplied by Cermex, it would be reasonable to predict that the champagne house will consider more Cermex kit next time it is looking to invest.

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