This advertising spot is an absolute must.
Top model Hana Soukupová alights from the Tatra 87 vintage car and — clad in a trick-animated water dress — glides into one of Carlsbad’s finest restaurants.
Time stands still for 30 seconds, with everyone’s mouth and eyes wide open. And when she then breathes the question: “Did you order Mattoni”?, looking at a young guest in the restaurant, this sends any viewer into raptures.
Hana Soukupová wears Mattoni. End of the ad.
Hana Soukupová was born in Carlsbad, and the chauffeur of the Tatra 87 is none other than Alessandro Pasquale, Director General of Karlovarské Minerálni Vody (KMV), the Czech Republic’s biggest mineral water bottler and Mattoni’s brand owner, who has now — getting down to earth again —installed a complete PETAsept line from Krones.
KMV can look back on a really notable career. In 1991 when the Italian water magnate Dr. Antonio Pasquale took over the state-run “West-Bohemian Mineral Water Bottler”, this firm filled a mere five million bottles a year in only two different containers.
Today, with a turnover of 240 million euros, the group sells more than 700 million bottles per annum, and one billion litres respectively, in over 200 different stock-keeping units.
PET pioneers
Not until the Pasquale family took over the firm’s reins was the excellent reputation of Mattoni mineral water again carried to all four corners of the globe.
The Pasquales have for many generations been at home in the beverage sector, originally as wine merchants, with Angelo Pasquale, the grandfather of today’s KMV Director General Alessandro Pasquale, later on starting to bottle soft drinks at a facility near Padua.
It was from these beginnings that his son, Dr. Antonio Pasquale, developed the Aqua Vera water brand, which achieved a meteoric rise from zero to Italy’s market leader.
As one of the very first PET pioneers, Dr. Antonio Pasquale was filling Aqua Vera in PET back in the early 1980s, thus manifesting the firm’s success.
Subsequently, he first sold shares in the company to Perrier, which was then taken over by Nestlé. Since 1995, Aqua Vera has been owned 100 % by Nestlé.
Four years previously, Dr. Pasquale had bought the Mattoni mineral water bottling firm, as a sideline, to tell the truth, for his subsequent (un)restful retirement. But that did not work out. Today, the KMV Group is larger than the Aqua Vera brand originally built up.
Water market rounded off
Since 2003, his son Alessandro Pasquale has also been involved in building up the brand in Czechia, having been promoted General Manager in 2008, with his father being the Chairman of the Board of Directors. The family did not rest content with the Karlovy Vary facility.
In Mnichov near Marienbad, KMV set up a greenfield plant for bottling the Magnesia mineral water, one — as the names implies — with a marked magnesium content. As far back as 1995, KMV also acquired the HBSW company with its mineral water facility Dobra Voda near Budweis.
Following protracted negotiations with the Czech monopoly agencies, KMV was likewise permitted to swallow Czechia’s second-largest mineral water producer Podebradka in 2006.
In 2008 KMV took over 100 per cent of the stock in Austrian spring Waldquelle Kobersdorf, which is, in fact, likewise the Number Two in Austria’s water market with a market share of 17 per cent.
From 1991 to 2008, a cool 203 million euros were invested by the family in building up the group, and another 30 million euros in 2009.
The unequivocal market leader
KMV is the clear market leader in the overall Czech soft-drinks market, accounting for more than a quarter of it, and a long way ahead of Coca-Cola in second place. KMV is the Number One for soft drinks, mineral water, carbonated soft drinks, ice tea and functional drinks.
KMV’s strengths as far as mineral water is concerned rest on three brand keystones. The most prestigious brand is and will remain Mattoni, which is available as natural mineral water and near-water drink in a variety of flavours like lime, orange, grapefruit, peach, apple, pear, pomegranate and white grape, and also as Mattoni Sport and Mattoni Active Energy Drink with sportscaps.
The second brand filled in Kyselka is Aquila, the Czech Republic’s best-selling spring water by volume. This brand, too, is available in a broad product range, comprising natural still Aquila water, a variety of flavoured waters, the Aqua Beauty product line, plus seven different sorts of ice tea: Aquila TEA.M.
And last but not least, the third brand keystone is the Magnesia mineral water with a magnesium and bicarbonate content, likewise sold as clear water and as the flavoured Magnesia Multia.
From a dedicated glass market to the absolute PET market Czech retailers sell their beverages almost exclusively in PET containers. Lasting until the early 1990s, Czechia was a dedicated glass market. From 1995 to 1997, the market then made a U-turn from 80 per cent glass to 80 per cent PET.
“Things were happening extremely fast in Eastern Europe”, explains Alessandro Pasquale. “In those years, high sums of capital expenditure were channelled into building up enormous PET capacities.”
KMV, too, now fills glass bottles only for the catering sector. And this is, of course, reflected in the kit installed at the Kyselka facility. There is just one glass line, but no fewer than six PET lines rated at 22,000 to 28,000 containers an hour each.
All of them have been accommodated in two-storey bottling halls fitting snugly into the narrow valley. When the new hall for the aseptics line was erected, it even had to be built over a stream, which just a few 100 metres further down disembogues in the Eger. At the opposite bank of the Eger, there is yet another hall, which houses the firm’s own preform production operation.
Aseptics a first
After all those years of accumulated experience with PET bottling, KMV has now decided to install an aseptic line, its first. For two different reasons, as Alessandro Pasquale explains:
“Firstly, we want to bottle the existing products without preservatives in future, for example sports drinks and flavoured still water. Secondly, we want to tap into entirely new beverage segments.
"We have more than 20 products up our sleeve, which we will be successively testing on the market in the near future”, he reveals. “We want to introduce transversal products, which merge different segments, genuinely innovative beverages which are not yet available on the market.
"We want to be very, very flexible as far as product diversity is concerned, and have planned the line accordingly.”
KMV opted for a complete line from Krones here for the first time, and for a blow-moulder/filler BLOC — another first. The 1,700-square-metre room is in its entirety subjected to a slight overpressure with filtered air, so as to avoid germs being carried in from outside.
A Contiform S16 is here BLOC-synchronised with a Steriljet L wet steriliser, an aseptic Variojet rinser and an aseptic filler Volumetic VODM-PET, which is also suitable for filling highly corrosive beverages, all of this in isolator technology.
“We’ve opted for wet sterilisation using peracetic acid because this is the tried-and-tested technology”, explains Alessandro Pasquale. This also applies for closure sterilisation of flatcaps with two different diameters in the sterile bath.
Exception: two varieties of sportscaps are dry-sterilised in a hydrogen-peroxide bath.
"You see, a BLOC is just one machine, it should work better than two separate machines, it can do without air conveyors, has a smaller footprint, can be run by only one operator and needs less energy,” is how Alessandro Pasquale’s list of arguments goes.
“In my opinion, that’s also the future of bottling as such.”
In case the filler should nonetheless fail for a short time, KMV has had a short air-conveyor loop installed between the blow-moulder and the Steriljet, which is long enough to empty the blow-moulder’s oven. This reliably prevents any preform losses.
Two labellers installed in succession
There is a buffer section downstream of the filler, too, in the shape of an Accutable with a stainless steel casing, supplied by a Flowliner. In line with the firm’s creed of maximised flexibility, two labellers have been installed in succession: a Contiroll HS Highspeed wrap-around labeller and a Sleevematic sleeving machine with Shrinkmat steam tunnel.
The tray blanks are fed into the downstream Variopac Pro TFS at a gradient from the side, for maximised operator-friendliness. Two different types of handle can then be applied to the finished packs for convenient carrying.
Flexibility, too, on the product side: the thermal VarioAsept J UHT treatment unit has been designed as a shell-and-tube heat exchanger, which also permits beverages with a fibre content to be handled.
The bottling room likewise accommodates the Contiflow 45/2 beverage treatment system and the AquaAsept L sterile-water treatment unit.
Three-phase synchronous motors in the conveyor technology
In the conveyor technology, Krones in this line uses permanent-magnet three-phase synchronous motors (PM motors) of Class IE4 (super premium efficiency) for the first time.
PM motors exhibit energy efficiency classes that are unequalled even today by the most efficient asynchronous motors. The biggest advantage offered by the PM motor is its very good efficiency of around 90 per cent and the resultantly lower electricity consumption.
As a comparison: the efficiency of an asynchronous motor is at a mere 65 to 70 per cent. Higher investment costs than for conventional drive technology were not incurred by this decision.
Outside the pressurised room, there are firstly the Vario DOS CAF-Liquid hygiene centre and the VarioClean CIP system, and secondly the Modulpal 2A palletiser with Robobox pack grouping system and a downstream pallet wrapper.
There’s no sorcery about aseptics
“There’s no sorcery about aseptics”, says Alessandro Pasquale. “Any plant can introduce that, provided they prepare properly for it.”
So preparation was the be-all and end-all for KMV: “Together with Krones, we made sure we had optimum planning, even in the run-up, before the contract was signed. That’s why the entire installation went almost without a hitch”, confirms Alessandro Pasquale.
“We put our trust in the quality and in the service Krones is renowned for, and justifiably so, a service which, thanks to the proximity of the firm’s locations is rendered even better.”
Time is money
KMV has been cooperating with Krones since 1998. Back then, Dr. Antonio Pasquale was one of the first customers to invest in blow-moulder technology from Krones, thus paving the way for the Contiform’s success. In the meantime, three Contiform S machines blow-mould the bottles in the Kyselka facility “and we’re very satisfied with this technology.
The entire aseptics project went as smoothly as it did because joint preparation was excellently planned”, opines Alessandro Pasquale.
All in all, the project needed well-nigh precisely twelve months between signing the contract and product-on-the-market in November 2009.
“That’s a good timeframe”, is Pasquale’s verdict. “Because nowadays, you see, everything has to happen fast. Every month of delay means one month of lost sales on the market, means one month more of capital costs without revenues.”
Time is money. That’s something KMV found out the hard way when it came to the (not entirely cheap) post-processing work for the water dress advertising spot.
The production firm needed no less than three months for retrospectively snug-fitting on film a swinging, refreshing dress of pure water to Hana Soukupová’s top model body.
It was only the chauffeur in the old Tatra who worked free of charge in that cold winter’s night when the spot was shot.
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