01/2019

SIPA helps Philippine Bottling Beverage stay close to nature

SIPA has helped a company in the Philippines bring to market the first bottled water in the country that is named after its source. Philippine Bottling Beverage launched Banahaw Spring Purified Water last year. The water is named after its source, Mount Banahaw, which is just a few miles away from the company’s bottling plant in San Pablo, about 50 miles south of Manila.

Mount Banahaw is an active volcano, sacred to locals and to pilgrims outside Laguna province, with mountaineering trails and hot springs. The plant at Philippine Bottling Beverage – or PBB – is fully automated, “preserving the essential natural qualities of the water from the mountain,” says PBB Business Development Manager Thor Jourdan Mutuc. “Beyond careful usage of water, we are putting in place measures that are geared toward protecting forests that nurture groundwater and contribute to the healthy circulation of water in nature,” Thor says. “Our world-class facility is strategically located to create the perfect balance between its natural water source and the plant’s innovations.”

PBB supplies Banahaw Spring Purified Water in three bottle sizes: 350 and 500 mL, and one-liter sizes, designed with a special curvature that makes them very easy to hold. The bottle caps are very light to help reduce the overall carbon footprint of the product. After years of research and testing to perfect the product, several months ago PBB had SIPA install a complete bottling line for the purified water. The line goes all the way from an XFORM 350 PET preform production system with a 48-cavity mold, through an SFR EVO3 six-cavity stretch-blow molding unit and a Stillfill SP filling unit, to labeling, palletizing, and stretch-wrapping, with all the necessary associated ancillaries.

The line runs at a speed of up to 13,000 bottles per hour. “The collaboration between our two companies began with us offering a turnkey filling line, and that then expanded to include in-house production of preforms to drastically reduce packaging and logistics costs,” says SIPA Regional Manager Gianfranco Perricci. “PBB tells us it is really happy with the line and our proactive approach and readiness to resolve any potential problems”. “SIPA will continue to serve PBB to ensure the quality of a service that PBB, in turn, can guarantee its own customers.” PBB is a 100% Filipino-owned company whose business involves not only its own new Banahaw Spring brand, but also manufacturing, private labeling and tolling of other liquid products, together with marketing.