AboutEric Hofer Expertise Over 27 years experience, with 17 in international FMCG in back office operations and in field sales and data collection, including design, development and deployment of Handhelds, Marketing Equipment (Service, Tracking and Return on Investment), reporting and Vending management. Have participated on the launch of operations in new markets, and re-engineered the back office in several countries.
Experience Designed and led the development and deployment internal ERP system for Pepsi used in On-Premise/Vending in 13 markets.
Designed 2 handheld systems, the latest is now deployed in 4 markets internationally.
Re-engineered the back office functions (settlements, despatch, invoicing, credit control, etc) for over 20 snack, confectionary and beverage operators.
Developing software: Progress, VB, Access, C, Sybase, SA
Organizations Innovative-Selling Solutions
Publications BudapestSun
Education/Credentials State University of New York - BA Economics
NYU - Courant - Graduate work - Computing
Past/Present clients PepsiAmericas
PepsiCola International
PepsiCola Company
British Steel
British Telecom
Britvic (Pepsi's bottler in the UK)
AT&T
BellSouth
Mars Overseas Bottling
Pepsi France
Matutano (Frito-Lay Spain)
Frito-Lay
Pepsi Foods International
Chase Manhattan Bank
Kidder Peabody
National Power
SmithKline Beecham
Mars Overseas Bottling (Pepsi Azerbaijan)
A&P Bottling (Pepsi Serbia & Montenegro)
Iberia Bottlers (Pepsi Georgia)
Question What company makes custom shaped water bottles for spring water to be bottled and sold @ retail? Like Avian or Arrowhead water. Not a custom labeling company, but one that can actually produce a custom shaped bottle and maybe even do the bottling as well before distribution.
Answer Don,
I think you mean "Evian" (Avian is a bird and does not spell "Naive" backwards); Arrowhead is a Nestle brand in the US. Am I right?
Your question suggests you think the bottles are pre-made. So to that point let me clarify. Softdrink cans and glass bottles are typically pre-made; PET the most popular conduit is less likely to be made "off-site".
So instead, the brands that you cited have bottling lines that generate the bottles from molds; the molds either take pellet resin or pre-forms (slugs that look like cigar holders) which when warmed can be reformed into the shape of the bottle wanted.
My own experience was with the "Carolina" form that Pepsi uses. Here the company spent a lot of money (read dollars with lots of zeroes) to create a distinctive shape.
You can google for companies that make molds. There are 1000s around the world.
3rd Party bottling of a product is done. Its either something that
- established players do when then don't have enough capacity in their own plants,
- private labellers do, as they just put up cash and put their own labels in their own bottles on the product, or
- when the product itself requires either special conditions or mixing that in turn requires machinery that is less common-place.
Now you're talking about a spring water. For this to work (and I assume its your particular spring water that you're wanting to bottle in your own distinctive bottles, right?) then you have 2 options either:
- you're going to load up tankers, take the water to someplace else (and hope that there's no impact transporting the water, etc. while having the budget to pay to ship water); or
- its done on site which means building a bottling line (probably at least 4M USD, but if it has any real line capacity more like 12)....
For your situation, I don't think its viable... Here's my thinking...
If you're going to tanker your water to a company, run their line - and they have to stop production to switch, cream off the slag to flush the line, then run the line to bottle a "tankers" worth of water - then how many cases do you expect to produce in that one run? To make it economical to produce say 25,000 cases, are you going to rent a fleet of tankers? Are you going to build some sort of filling station at the source? And after all of this are you going to truck back the pallets for distribution?
Hopefully you're seeing that the costs involved in the off-site bottling (for spring water) are show-stoppers when it comes to spring water.
So, its bottling on-site.
Now this is possible, but either you have to have a lot of capital and expertise to set up a mechanized line; or you do it the old fashioned way, by hand with a hose and a bottle. In either case, you'll still have some more costs as you'll need to ensure that you don't have anything harmful in the water. In the countries where I've worked, including those with hardly any laws one has ALWAYS needed an on-site assayer constantly checking the quality, etc. to get and maintain one's license.
Think about the above, and lets chat further as to what your next move might be. Keep in mind, whatever you chose, you should be determining:
- Is there a market?
- How much capital do you have?
- How much risk are you willing to take?
