At the Cutting Edge of Beverage Filling - Verpackungs-Rundschau

BEER
Getting a Grip on Multipacks
Convenience Packaging Carries the Day for Danish Brewer
Carlsberg/Tuborg, the leading Danish
brewer, started using a multipack
system from packaging
specialist AssiDomän in 1994. Since then
sales have increased for the company as
retailers and consumers alike have taken
to the new convenience packs and their attractive
designs.
“It was AssiDomän who took the initiative.
They approached us with a new concept
that fitted in very well with our strategy”,
Torben Valsted, trade marketing
manager for the Tuborg brand, told VR.
This new strategy was to develop a relationship
with the consumer who had become
more intent upon emphasising individuality
and much less responsive to
mass communications. The packaging of
the beer was targeted as the main tool to
demonstrate the quality of the product
within and differentiate the company from
others, especially the private label and
discount beers that had become extremely
price competitive.
AssiDomän had developed a multipackaging
concept called the Multra Systems,
a convenience packaging system for
anything from 4 to 36 items (cans or
bottles) per pack, together with its corrugated
division, in Denmark Corrpack and
its printing division Corrprint. Because
Corrpack was involved, the company
looked for a Danish partner to test the new
concept. A prototype line was installed at
the brewery in Copenhagen for the packaging
of Tuborg and Carlsberg brands for
test marketing.
“Re-education” of the consumer took a
while because poor handling quality of
other multipacks meant they were wary of
the new product. “One of the great challenges
was to convince consumers that
they could comfortably take the pack by
the handle”, Ronny Roelandt, sales and
marketing manager AssiDomän Multra
Systems, explained. Danish consumers
had never been confronted with this type
of pack as they had always bought larger
quantities in crates. A handle reinforced
with a polyester tape and a pack design
that channels physical force away from the
crucial point in the packaging material
makes the pack very easy to handle.
Because the pack is made of corrugated
fibre board,it is light in weight,very robust
and functional, essential criteria for the
brewers.
Immediate Impact
Multipacks are not always accepted at face
value by consumers, who want to be sure
of what is actually in the pack and
often rip open the packaging at point of
sale. Taking this into consideration, Assi-
Domän came up with a pack that can be
fully enclosed, but with endless variations
and graphic possibilities, or with cut-outs
or even windows, leaving the consumer in
no doubt about the contents.
An additional behaviour pattern observed
in consumers is the fact that the
average time spent looking at a product in
the beer section is twelve seconds. A pack
design must “speak” to the potential buyer
in this short span; added value and convenience
must be immediately obvious.
Of the first trials, one pack was an enclosed,
bevelled-edge 12-bottle version.
The design was a Tuborg-green background
and a very large reproduction of
the word beer. It did not have quite the desired
effect as the brewery had over-estimated
consumer recognition of the Tuborg
colour separated from the traditional
logo. Nevertheless, the packs were eventually
accepted very well by the market.
Carlsberg/Tuborg use a AssiDomän
multrapacker MK2 packaging line which
can run at up to a speed of 60 Multra packs
per minute. One of the machine’s most interesting
features is that it does not wrap
around the items to be packed as is
usually done in packaging processes. Instead,
the blanks are semi-assembled by
pistons and dies that are fixed for that particular
type of pack – square, round and
chamfered corners are all possible. This
ensures absolute accuracy in producing
squared packs,which in turn enhances the
The unique folding process of the Multrapackers maximises the printable surface of the pack
VR Beverage Packaging 1997 13