materialhandlingupdate
BY DAVID MALONEY, SENIOR EDITOR
Argozumos, a Spanish provider of juice products,
moves to automation to keep its beverages flowing. Distribution juiced to the max
MANUFACTURING GROWTH IS USUALLY A GOOD THING. BUT IT
can cause headaches for the distribution end of the operation. Argozumos,
a Spanish provider of juice products and a subsidiary of Germany’s riha
Group, managed to avoid that trap when it had to make changes at its bottling facility in Lekunberri, Spain, to accommodate increases in production. Basically, it took pre-emptive action by addressing its distribution
needs at the same time it added new filling capacity.
Since its founding in 1981, Argozumos has sought to be innovative with
its juice products. It was the first to introduce soft-pack juices to the
Spanish market and recently became the first bottler in its country to
install an aseptically filled juice line. The new PET-Asept-D line uses a dry
process that sterilizes plastic juice containers using gaseous hydrogen peroxide instead of water. (The facility is limited in the amount of wastewater
it can discharge.)
The innovative juice line was completed in 2008 at the Lekunberri distribution center, located in northern Spain about 20 miles from Pamplona. Sales of juices in the plastic PET bottles
have since surpassed sales of cartoned juices.
In order to accommodate the added production volumes from the new line, some changes to
the distribution end of the building would be needed. Products had been floor-stored on pallets prior to the addition of the new line, but the number of available locations in the warehouse
was limited. Some new space would have to be found—and fast.
Argozumos looked to Krones for an answer. For decades, Krones has been known as a leading equipment supplier in the beverage, food packaging, and processing industries, and it was,
in fact, the provider of the new aseptic filling line at Lekunberri. But Krones also designs and
supplies distribution equipment, including automated storage systems. Krones says that
because production increases often translate into distribution challenges, it takes a holistic
approach to logistics, offering its customers systems that integrate the two aspects.
