Amcor collaboration brings Garçon Wines’ rPET bottles to US market

11 Feb 2020 --- Plastics packaging giant Amcor has teamed up with British multi-award-winning start-up Garçon Wines to bring its 100 percent recycled and recyclable letterbox friendly wine bottle to the US market. Posing a challenge to traditional round glass bottles, the recycled PET (rPET) flat bottle has patents pending in the US and will become widely available in the world’s biggest wine market in the second half of 2020. Amcor will be showcasing the Garçon Wines bottle and a range of new PET bottle concepts at the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium.

A 2018 Dow Packaging Innovation Awards Diamond Finalist, Garçon Wines’ packaging has been generating significant interest in its home country of the UK as well as Europe and will now enter the US market as part of its multinational expansion. By innovating in shape and using best-in-class material, it has become a game-changing solution in the drive for a circular economy for plastics.

The British start-up has just taken home another accolade for innovation in the inaugural Food & Drink Awards. Hosted by entertainment luminary Stephen Fry, the winners were revealed to the public in a star-studded ceremony televised on ITV to UK audiences on Sunday evening.

“We are pleased and motivated that Amcor is collaborating with us as our US supply-partner for our innovative bottles, as they are the leading packaging provider, glass bottles aside, to the US wine industry,” Garçon Wines’ Co-Founder Santiago Navarro, tells PackagingInsights.The Innovation Award winners Santiago Navarro and Amelia Dales at The Food and Drink Awards, UK.

“Amcor has successful businesses supplying plastic packaging and screw caps to US companies in wine, and hence they understand the industry and have existing relationships with companies along the value chain of wine. Therefore, they are best placed to assist in making the activation of our packaging easier, whilst increasing the chances of our success, and the resulting size and scope of any success.”

A very similar bottle design
The US version of Garçon Wines’ rPET bottle, which will be produced in collaboration with Amcor, will be a very close design to the UK/EU version being produced in collaboration with Berry M&H, Navarro indicates.

“The bottles do differ ever so slightly, but these differences will be hard to detect on the human eye. The most recognizable difference is likely to be the color of the bottles, and the exact colors are still to be decided for the US.”

“As the round Bordeaux 75 cl bottle is the most popular bottle shape in wine on both sides of the Atlantic, we have chosen to go to market first with our flat Bordeaux 75 cl bottle design in both these regions,” he explains.

Further, the US bottle will be made from post-consumer recycled (PCR) PET and Garçon Wines’ hopes to ultimately produce a bottle made entirely from PCR in the future.

“Importantly, making the bottle from PET will ensure that it is recyclable after use, same as our PET wine bottle is in the UK and EU. This is one of the key benefits of our bottles and of using PET; it is easily and widely recyclable, and takes considerably less energy to recycle than glass,” Navarro adds.

Big market opportunities and challenges
Navarro believes that Garçon Wines’ entrance into the US market will be significantly easier than its entrance into the UK and EU markets.

“The learnings from our activities in the UK and EU have taught us helpful lessons in the ‘dos and don’ts’ and this will mean our challenges will be fewer.”

“Furthermore, we benefit from significant reputational traction and commercial traction too and this will help with the acceptance and adoption of our sustainable wine packaging solutions in the US.”

At this early stage, Navarro suspects that the major challenge will be in ensuring the start-up has enough bottling capacity availability, geographically spread across such a large country, to accommodate for filling its bottles for the US wine industry.Amcor will be showcasing its new PET bottle concepts at the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium in the US.

“We’re already working on addressing this challenge, as, once again, this is a learning from our UK/EU business, which we are using to ensure we minimize the challenges to our US business.”

Fronting up to an existential threat
Garçon Wines’ Co-Founder Santiago Navarro spoke in detail to PackagingInsights at the 8th Global Packaged Summit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, about what he considers the existential threat of climate change and how recycled plastic packaging can help to overcome this challenge.

“As we are facing a climate emergency and existential threat, we urgently need to be making step changes to products to slash their carbon footprint. Flattening the wine bottle saves space and making it from recycled PET saves weight and energy,” Navarro explains.

PET, which has rapidly become one of the world’s most preferred packaging materials, is lightweight, shatterproof, resealable, reusable and, in theory, infinitely recyclable. PET plastic bottles often have the lowest carbon footprint and their production results in up to 70 percent less greenhouse gas emissions compared to viable alternatives, according to Amcor’s Asset Lifecycle Analysis.

“We know today’s wine consumers are looking for a unique experience,” says Beth Rettig, Vice President of Spirits, Wine and Food at Amcor Rigid Packaging. “Amcor’s concepts are sleek, modern and perfectly matched to today’s lifestyle requirements for convenience and sustainability. PET bottles are unbreakable, beach- and pool-friendly and the designs are only limited by the imagination. There are also environmental benefits: our bottles are lightweight, infinitely recyclable and have a lower carbon footprint than glass bottles or aluminum cans.”

Amcor will be showcasing its new PET bottle concepts at the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium in the US.

By Joshua Poole