NU-PURE: JUST GOOD WATER An upmarket approach to spring water: Nu-Pure Beverages in the Australian town of Yatala near Brisbane, with its eponymous Nu-Pure
Spring Water, prioritises brand policy and a high-price strategy, giving preference to the horeca market, and is reaping abundant rewards. For its fi lling technology, the mid-tier privately owned Australian company prefers relatively small, fl exible line units with high-tech solutions from Kosme. Following the installation of the fi rm’s fi rst Kosme line, rated at 12,000 PET containers an hour, in 2011, a second, identical line will be going into operation during the late summer of 2013, at a new facility in Melbourne. At the same time, Nu-Pure has been upgrading its profi le by means of a square bottle, by lightweighting and by the use of biodegradable plastics
They had known each other for a quarter of a century, they’d been sandpit friends: Mark Holmes and Barry Hamilton. As luck would have it, the two of them had begun their careers in the same sector. Mark Holmes had for many years been responsible for operations at National Foods, while Barry Hamilton spent twelve years in marketing at Cadbury Schweppes. The two of them instinctively felt that there excellent opportunities to be seized with bottled water. In 2005, they set up their own company, with their own funding.
In 2005, they began to fi ll water in 600-millilitre bottles weighing 29 grams, on a small line rated at 3,000 containers an hour; they obtained the water from two springs near Mount Tambourine.
CONCENTRATING ON THE BRAND
Right from the start, their principal focus was on establishing the Nu-Pure brand. At fi rst, they did this with rather moderate success in the market’s customary round bottle. Still, by 2009, sales had climbed to around fi ve million bottles. Then they attempted to raise their profi le with a square 600-millilitre bottle, the fi rst and only one on the Australian market. Result: within three months, sales had tripled. Today, Nu-Pure Beverages produces around 70 million fi lls a year.
This increase in output was made possible, of course, only
by investing in higher bottling capacities. For this purpose, the two owners and managing directors erected a new plant on a 6,000-square-metre site in Yatala, half-way between the springs and the metropolis of Brisbane, with its two million people. Here, Nu-Pure initially installed the existing small bottling line from the old plant, plus an existing manual line for fi lling 110-millilitre beakers, which are a popular choice for airlines.
A COMPLETE LINE FROM KOSME
Nu-Pure ordered a complete new line from Kosme rated at 12,000 containers an hour. For the fi rst time, too, Nu-Pure began to produce its own PET containers inline from preforms, using a Kosme KSB 6R rotary blow-moulding machine, which is monobloc-synchronised by a worm with a Kosme level-controlled fi ller for still beverages. The fi lled PET containers are then blow- dried, so that they can be reliably dressed on the Kosme Rollstar labeller, which is fi tted with a Krones Contiroll wrap-around labelling station. An automatic Divipack divider distributes the containers from one to several rows, whereupon they are fed to the shrink-packer, which assembles the 600-millilitre bottles into 12-bottle shrink-packs and 24-bottle tray shrink-packs. At the end of the line, the packs are placed on pallets and the stacks stabilised by a wrapper.
The line mainly fi lls the 600-millilitre containers, the most popular size, and almost exclusively the Nu-Pure brand, totalling around 300,000 litres of spring water a day in 24/7 continuous operation “The rating of 12,000 bottles an hour is perfect for our needs. It also makes us more fl exible in terms of the technology involved. If some fundamental change occurs, we can install something quite different in fi ve years’ time”, says Barry Hamilton. “What’s more, in a second step, we can if necessary put an identical line next to it, we’ve kept the space free for this.”
SECOND-STRONGEST BRAND ON THE HORECA MARKET
“Our business is to establish a brand and provide the
appropriate technology for it”, is how Barry Hamilton sums up the fi rm’s philosophy. And he does this in two different marketing channels: fi rstly through the wholesalers, with ties to more than 200 of them nationwide, and secondly on the horeca market, where Nu-Pure is meanwhile the second-strongest water brand. Our strategy is focused on the brand. We are a production and marketing company pure and simple.” The average retail price for a 600-millilitre bottle of Nu-Pure in the shop is around 2.50 Australian dollars (about two euros). “And basically it’s just good water!”
Nonetheless, he also sees opportunities for a house-brand
RIGHT FROM THE START, THEIR PRINCIPAL FOCUS WAS ON ESTABLISHING THE NU-PURE BRAND
presence, not least with the Aldi and Cosco chains. But the Nu- Pure brand accounts for more than 90 per cent of total sales, and there are no plans to alter this. “Contract bottling is a marginal business for us”, he emphasises.
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