When I walked onto the show floor amid the hum of a thousand spinning and shaking and shuffling machines, I was sure I was in over my head. Over the next four days of Pack Expo 2016, though, I saw something of the complexity and expense involved in beginning to automate your bottle or can lines.
The first thing I took away was how reasonably priced so much beer is when it comes down to it. We don’t flinch at paying more for more exclusive wine or cheese or even bread, but we tend to want our beer to always be within a pretty small price range. Plenty of breweries are pricing higher because they have to, and consumers are starting to understand that they can’t expect every 6-pack to cost $8.99 ($9.99 more often than not, in Chicago).
The second thing I took away was that craft beer has made its mark in American manufacturing. Large producers are taking notice of the growing industry and looking for ways to help breweries get into packaging with their equipment.
As I observe in the first of three articles on the show that will appear in CraftBrewingBusiness.com:
If you went to CBC in Philadelphia, you may have seen some of these new machines. The story at Pack Expo was not new machines so much as that corporations like Barry Wehmiller, Graphic Packaging, Hamrick and ProMach brought these machines to such a huge event. Even Krones, which did not bring its craft-sector machine, still displayed 6-pack Gumballhead and Alpha King baskets to associate themselves with craft beer.
To see some of the other cool trends in canning, labeling, and packaging, find the rest of the article here.
Image: ©PMMI
