Altmühltaler Mineralbrunnen assigns greenfield project to Krones

Altmühltaler Mineralbrunnen GmbH, Treuchtlingen, Germany, are building a new water bottling facility on a greenfield site in Breuna near Kassel. And Krones AG is the main contractor responsible for managing the entire “VITAQUA” project. The only exception is the actual building, which Altmühltaler Mineralbrunnen is handling itself. In the initial stage of expansion, the giant facility will be able to operate four bottling lines.
Altmühltaler Mineralbrunnen is one of Germany’s largest mineral water bottlers. It produces only dealer’s brands at its facilities in Treuchtlingen, Central Franconia, and Baruth near Berlin. Each of these plants is already using Krones bottling and packaging technology.
Krones is supplying the entire process section for the still and carbonated water products and the soft drinks, plus the low-pressure compressors and the heating plant. The Contiflow mixing systems supply product to the PET bottling lines. Four Contiform S24 blow-moulders, each of them rated at 43,200 containers an hour, are producing 1.5 l-PET containers and 0.5 l-containers in single-serve size. Four Modulfill fillers, featuring a high level of hygiene with their no-front-table concept, are used for bottling the soft drinks.
Variopac Pro packers and a palletising system finalise the packaging process. The europallets are accepted by an electric suspended monorail system, which stores the pallets fully automatically in a Krones-designed high-bay warehouse APW-System with more than 50,000 slots. The fleet management system too, like the warehouse management software and the bottling schedule planning software, comes from Krones AG.
The entire process technology and the bottling lines are scheduled for installation by October 2007. The high-bay warehouse will be completed early in 2008. Besides a bidder consortium, Krones was the only vendor able to offer a complete turnkey factory in this order of magnitude.