Today’s beer industry offers an enormous variety of beverages. From immune boosting beer to marshmallow-cereal-flavored IPAs, customers can pick from any number of types of brews and flavors. Whatever your specialty is, improving the efficiency of your beer packaging equipment through automation can help increase your output and decrease costs. Here are some of the ways automation can help you ensure that your unique product gets delivered quickly and safely.

You Can (and Should) Automate Your Brewery Packaging Line

You don’t have to be a large, international conglomerate to profit from automation. Many smaller craft beer and beverage producers are benefiting from automated beer packaging equipment, too. While an industrial packing solution does require some up front investment, that investment will quickly pay for itself through increased productivity and improved waste management. Plus, once you incorporate automation on the packaging line, you no longer have to allocate workers to the packaging process. This allows you to invest labor into other areas, such as preparing finished items for shipping.

Automate with the Right Partner

Wayne Automation partners with a wide range of beer and beverage producers, supplying our innovative packaging automation machinery. Our goal is to provide you with reliable brewery packaging automation that steadily reduces production costs and maintains an overall sustainable system.

We want you to succeed in all aspects of your brewing business by helping you quickly and efficiently organize your bottled goods for distribution. Still, while automation contains many benefits, there are a few things you should consider before you dive right in. So here is a short checklist of things to consider before you go fully automated.

5 Other Things to Consider When Automating

As mentioned, automating your beer case packaging requires making an investment into a new way of doing things. However, this is becoming more necessary if you intend to scale in a demanding market. When researching your options for automated beer packaging equipment, there is more than just machinery that should be included in your evaluations. For example:

1. Speed – As you transition into automated packaging, you must consider how quickly you can alter your brewery packaging line to a new form factor. Let’s say you want to bottle something special for the holidays, and you need to make a quick change. We can help with that. All our products feature tool-free adjustment. We even provide the option for fully automatic changeover between different preset products.
2. Simplicity – The last thing you need is your automated system to be awkward and difficult to control. Our erectors, inserters, sealers, and formers are controlled by Allen Bradley microelectronics. These include automatic cutoff switches, and a high definition touch screen input where all the controls are consolidated. This makes it easy for operators to keep your products moving smoothly down the line.
3. Safety – We have considered the safety of your personnel at every step in our designs. Our machines feature rotary brakes to completely lock the system during maintenance. Also, regular maintenance tasks are displayed through the Total Planned Maintenance (TPM) option on the touchscreen as an available upgrade.
4. Supplies – When you factor in ALL of the printing and packaging costs (cans, bottles, six-pack carriers, labels, crown caps, case boxes, etc.), it is possible that the material to store and ship your product can exceed the cost of making the beer itself. You will want to have a reliable system to calculate the supplies to efficiently package and distribute your products.
5. Space – When you integrate automation, you are initiating the power to do more. Naturally, there will be an initial need to allocate physical power and space to implement your automated beer packaging equipment. However, you should immediately consider the follow-up phases for when your operations scale. So from the start, it’s helpful to envision how you will handle the additional physical requirements to package your products once your increased sales demand a larger inventory.

Wayne Automation: Beer Packaging Experts

Wherever you are in the process of automating your brewery packaging line, Wayne Automation is here to answer your questions. We’ve been building innovative, high-quality packaging automation machinery since 1976. Our company’s principles are rooted in design and manufacturing, and our staff is ready to discuss how we can benefit your packaging process.