Bickford’s
Säfte, Softdrinks und Tees
Founded in 1839, Bickford’s is an independently owned business under The Bickford’s Group with its head office based in Adelaide, South Australia. The company enjoys premium positioning in the market and owns a wide product portfolio of non-alcoholic beverages. Bickford’s was already equipped with a complete flexible PET line from Sidel, managing both sensitive products and CSD via an Aseptic Combi Predis™ and a Combi SF300. After a successful partnership with Sidel on the 1 litre formats, Bickford’s needed to introduce two smaller PET formats to increase their market share: a 500 ml premium syrups & flavoured milks and a 250 ml format for their premium juice brand.
Sidel supported the customer to reach their ambitions with highly skilled experts and two advanced remote solutions: Remote Video Assistance (RVA) and Remote Access. Despite all the pandemic-related restrictions, everything was delivered on time with impact. In addition, and to respond to Bickford’s commitment to product quality and safety, Sidel showed great versatility by also carrying out the maintenance of the Aseptic Combi Predis™ remotely, while optimizing line efficiency.
Taking advantage of real-time video assistance, Sidel experts empowered the Bickford’s team to implement the best line configurations. Remote Access to the customer blow moulder, filler and labeller was also leveraged by the Sidel team to optimise recipe process parameters. In addition, the Bickford’s team benefitted from Sidel’s expertise in maintaining top line efficiency and ensuring overall packaging quality with a high degree of accuracy. This process focused on the optimisation of bottle conveyancing and the control of efficient machine operations.
To keep up with high product safety, 100 Clean In Place (CIP) cycle maintenance was also carried out remotely. Following careful guidance with RVA, the maintenance of Bickford’s Aseptic Combi Predis™ from disassembly, spare parts replacement, reassembly to testing and validation was accomplished in only three days.
"Time was precious to fulfil our market commitments. Sidel’s solid and prompt remote support empowered us to achieve the line conversion and the 100 CIP cycle maintenance with minimal downtime. These were great outcomes for our team. The strong knowledge foundations acquired by our technicians from previous Sidel training, together with the excellent expertise transfer enabled by their digital solution during these projects, was a formidable combination to keep on upskilling our team"
Operations Manager at Bickford’s
