A2 milk is Australia’s fastest growing grocery dairy brand due to its clear and unique point of difference that delivers a powerful consumer benefit of digestive well-being. In the first half of the financial year, sales increased by almost 50 per cent in this country compared to the previous half, and profits of A2 Corporation tripled.
To meet this increase in demand, the company has built its first milk processing facility, which opened in March this year and is located in the south western suburbs of Sydney.
Previously, A2 Dairy Products Australia freighted milk from Queensland, where the company works with contract processors, for the NSW market. It also sources its milk from contract processors in Victoria.
“There were some capacity constraints with our overall supply network and we had an opportunity to better serve our NSW customers by locating nearer to their distribution centres,” says Peter Nathan, CEO of A2 Dairy Products Australia.
Constructed on approximately 2500 square metres, the facility includes a purpose-built food-grade factory with state-of-the-art processing technology from Tetra Pak. Initially, it will process around 15 million litres of milk a year, with capacity to increase this to
50 million over time.
Fibre King was invited to participate in the design of a packaging line for the new facility, where bottling is carried out in-house. The project presented a number of challenges. The system needed to be designed to stringent specifications. It needed to pack non-round product at high speeds with minimal down-time and labour requirements, and allow for fast repeatable changeovers with minimum operator intervention.
Additionally, the system needed to be flexible enough to accommodate possible changes of packaging sizes, shapes and volumes in the future.
After an initial briefing, Fibre King’s design engineers brainstormed and returned to A2 a week later with several options for layouts, which were then refined in consultation with the client.
Fibre King’s complete turnkey end-of-line system for A2 incorporates case packing, palletising, stretch wrapping, case and pallet labelling and related case and pallet conveyors. The system’s function is to take labelled bottles from the filler, pack them into cases and palletise them. The pallets are then stretch-wrapped and labelled, and conveyed into the cool room.
“There are numerous advantages to being involved at the plant design stage,” says Fibre King. “The system we designed could be perfectly accommodated around walls, doors and drains, with no loss of valuable space and no compromising of equipment performance.”
The system, which was delivered on time and to specification, comprises a Wulftec WCA-Smart 150 Stretch Wrapper; a Matthews FOX4400 Pallet Labeller; a Fibre King WAP25 Intermittent Motion Case Packer with motorised adjustment; a CP30R Modular Case Palletiser with remote pallet dispenser; and interconnecting case and pallet conveyors.
The WAP25 Case Packer can accommodate multiple case styles, including wraparound, trays and shelf-ready, thereby future-proofing the system against changing packaging trends and production requirements. It provides gentle handling of the product and fast, repeatable format changeovers in less than 20 minutes.
The CP30R Palletiser accurately and consistently stacks cases with the aid of four-side layer compression, and offers pallet pattern versatility and rapid size-changing with pre-programmed selections and minimal mechanical adjustment. Additionally, the remote pallet dispenser has been designed to accommodate a future additional palletiser.
The end-of-line system is fully customised and built to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week for a serviceable life of over 15 years.
It is user focused, easy to operate and requires less manual intervention than other end-of-line systems.
“We have a number of international industry visitors to our new Sydney green field site, and they have been blown away by what we have created,” says Simon Hennessy, A2 general manager of international operations.
“Fibre King’s products and business have been very well presented by the team and the equipment’s performance reflects well on the company.”
“As a business consultant, it is vital that I can trust suppliers,” adds Alan Womersley of Insight to Incite, who acted as business consultant on the project.
“I was very pleased with Fibre King’s performance and cooperation throughout the project. There have been very few variations and Fibre King’s invoicing was spot-on to the dollar,” he says.
