FDBusiness.com

International food and drink group Princes has completed the first phase of a planned £17 million investment in its UK site at Toftshaw in Bradford with the opening of a new state-of-the-art, squash bottling line at the facility.

The new line is capable of handling varying sizes from 750 ml to 1.5 litres, with capacity to produce up to 36,000 bottles per hour. Six different bottle formats are planned to be commissioned by the end of December.

Light weighting bottles is a permanent activity within Princes, and this new line will allow the business to further reduce the weight of its bottles, removing approximately 300 tonnes of plastic from Princes supply chain every year.

Princes has made several recent announcements relating to the recycled content of the plastic it uses, with the shrink wrap packaging on its UK manufactured food and drinks moving to 50 percent post-consumer recycled waste (PCRW) by the end of this year. This followed confirmation that the business is using 51 percent recycled PET in all of its soft drinks and oils and 30 percent High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) in chilled juice drinks.

Bradford is the largest UK soft drinks production site in Princes’ portfolio, producing customer own brand still and carbonated soft drinks across a variety of flavours and pack formats.

The site employs over 400 people and is a Princes centre of excellence for fruit squash and manufactures products under the Jucee, Geebee and Wells brands. It also produces a wide range of customer own brand squash products including cordials, premium high juice and squash drinks.

Princes is committed to developing talent for its future, and twelve operator and eight engineering colleagues at Bradford have embarked on an intensive training course as part of the commissioning and performance testing process for the new equipment.

“Our new line at Bradford is delivering increased production, state-of-the-art equipment and better energy efficiency to the site, and is a major part of our commitment to UK manufacturing and providing long-term, high quality employment opportunities in the area,” explains Andy Hargraves, Group Director for Soft Drinks at Princes. “This investment is also a further example of the strong position we have on the recycled content in our drinks business, as part of our shared responsibility to reduce, re use and recycle all types of plastic.”

Princes has been one of Britain’s favourite food and drink brands for generations, offering a wide range of food and drink products including canned fish, meat and fruit, as well as fruit juices, sandwich pastes and snacks. With a global supply network and a portfolio of branded and customer own brand products, Princes is one of the UK’s largest food and drink groups.

The company specialises in sourcing and manufacturing quality products and, as a leading international grocery supplier, millions of consumers across Europe buy its brands and products every day.

The Princes head office is based in the UK (Liverpool) and the company also has a growing presence across continental Europe, which is managed from an office in The Netherlands. There are also dedicated sales and marketing offices in Poland, France and Italy and tuna processing facilities in Mauritius.

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The new bottling line was officially opened with a small ceremony attended by Princes Group Chairman Manabu Oda and Managing Director Cameron Mackintosh.