Niagara Bottling LLC

The challenge

Niagara Bottling, with more than 50 years of business experience, has based its success in the water market on offering its customers a safe, high-quality product that tastes great. The company chose to rely on its long-standing business relationship with Sidel when it installed a new complete PET line to enlarge its production capacity and answer consumer demand. This choice is proving key to delivering higher performance and safety, while increasing cost efficiency.

The solution

The Niagara line features two Super Combis, equipped with the innovative and compact ground-level preform feeder, EasyFEED™, along with Gebo conveying and end-of-line equipment. With output speeds of up to 82,000 bottles per hour, Sidel EasyFEED is optimal for PET water bottle producers like Niagara, who need to combine very high-speed production lines with handling ultra-light PET bottles, while increasing the availability of their lines. Niagara also chose the Roll-Fed labeller, which can handle lightweight containers and ultra-thin labels at the same time, allowing for better glue control and distribution, together with reduced consumption. At the end of the line, a high speed shrink-wrapping system delivers high quality packs, and the fully accessible low level palletiser with robotic layer preparation at the infeed always ensures reliable, non-stop production.

The outcome

The chosen solution maintains extremely good performance, providing the entire line with unmatched efficiency and flexibility from start to finish. This investment has enabled the ambitious bottler to significantly increase its productivity through high-speed, efficient manufacturing and high line availability rates. The company’s OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) improvements are worth about 2% more produced bottles per year. “In a line like the one embedding EasyFEED and the Sidel Super Combis, this translates to two million cases per year of extra productivity,” explained Bill Hall, Executive Vice President of Manufacturing “That would not have been possible with a traditional preform feeder, so we are happy with this achievement.” 

The Super Combi is the ideal way to maximise production and increase line efficiency while reducing TCO; a fact that Niagara has also noticed, stating that the all-in-one system has improved its overall packaging quality.