PET Bottle with 'Icy' Look

United Distillers & Vintners (UDV), Stamford, Conn., switched from glass to a PET bottle for its TGI Friday's On the Rocks line of single-serve, ready-to-drink cocktails. The former 200-ml glass container was round with vertical flutes. UDV wanted the new PET version to feature a pattern that would resemble pieces of ice.

United Distillers & Vintners (UDV), Stamford, Conn., switched from glass to a PET bottle for its TGI Friday's On the Rocks line of single-serve, ready-to-drink cocktails. The former 200-ml glass container was round with vertical flutes. UDV wanted the new PET version to feature a pattern that would resemble pieces of ice. Supplied by Schmalbach-Lubeca (S-L), the PET container features random patterns of ice cube shapes, which were hand-etched onto the mold surface. To achieve a solid glass-like feel, S-L selected a 30-g preform to keep the container walls thick and solid, yet enable efficient blow molding processes. A third challenge was to engineer an indexing feature that would orient the bottles for labeling without disturbing the aesthetics or negatively effecting the stability.