Julia LesererMozart Distillerie has opted for spherical glass bottles with paper foil and labels. Krones developed a rather special customised labeller for this client.
A label with creases – a no-no, really, but at the Mozart Distillerie this imperfectionism is quite intentional. Because the shiny paper foil wrapped around the spherical liqueur bottles quite deliberately evokes the impression that it has been applied by hand. With manual labelling, the high production figures would long since have ceased to be feasible, but the old line, too, was gradually approaching the limits of its capacity, in terms of both output and technological standards. This is why Mozart has now invested in a new labeller, which Krones has meticulously customised to suit the liqueur producer’s wishes.
In the past few years, the Mozart Distillerie has experienced an upturn unprecedented in the firm’s 65 years of corporate history: “Three years ago, we were still making 300,000 litres of Mozart Chocolate Liqueur a year, while the figure for 2019 was already 650,000. You can say that we’ve evolved from a manufactory into a proper production facility with a corresponding degree of automation,” relates Friedrich Guggenberger, authorised signatory and Plant Manager of the Mozart Distillerie.
The five different chocolate liqueurs are traditionally produced by hand, but bottled automatically. As time went by, however, one machine in particular was giving Mozart more and more headaches: the labeller, meanwhile 30 years old, was custom-built by a special-purpose-machine manufacturer and rated at 1,500 bottles per hour. “Since I joined Mozart 27 years ago, I’ve been tinkering with this machine, trying to improve its productivity and labelling results. Because after so many years on the clock, it was still labelling our spherical bottles, but no longer to the technological or output standards that have meanwhile become state of the art,” explains Friedrich Guggenberger.
It takes time to get things right
During the course of his career at Mozart, the passionate tinkerer Friedrich Guggenberger had already been thinking about how all of these requirements could be met on a single machine – and early in 2017 he finally succeeded in bringing Krones on board for actual implementation. “I’d started to lose hope that I would some day see my ideas translated into engineered reality,” he admits. But Krones accepted the challenge – and combined the long years of practical experience and visions of Friedrich Guggenberger and his team with the technical expertise of its own labelling specialists.
The results are truly impressive – since Mozart has received from Krones a line that meets every single one of the wishes previously expressed.
Both Mozart and Krones channelled a lot of energy into the development work. Throughout the project’s entire duration, there were numerous meetings, close cooperation, and intensive mutual feedback between the two companies. “Krones thought hard about how our requirements could be translated into engineered reality, and first of all built a prototype, in which we in turn incorporated our own empirical feedback,” relates Friedrich Guggenberger, who has plenty of praise for everyone concerned: “The people who were involved in design and assembly were so clued up that they immediately grasped all the problems and challenges involved and solved them straight away.”
I know that we had very many requirements for this labeller – but Krones met all of them. And the result is highly impressive; no other manufacturer could have managed it.
The new line is currently dressing around 5,000 bottles per hour, with an option for increasing the output to as much as 9,000 bph. And although the labeller now operates fully automatically in line with the very latest state of the art, to the outsider’s eye Mozart continues to embody its craft operation. Because no one crease resembles another – and the labeller handling the containers is just as unique as every single container it dresses.