“Wine fit for 21st century e-commerce”: Garçon Wines and DS Smith launch new 10-bottle transit case

27 Feb 2019 --- London-based Garçon Wines has launched a new Flat Bottle Case that is aimed at maximizing efficiency, saving space and slashing excessive packaging and carbon emissions. Developed in collaboration with packaging industry lead player DS Smith, the case can hold ten full-sized, flat wine bottles in a case that would fit only four traditional round bottles of the same 75cl volume. The launch is the latest in a string of headline-grabbing offerings from Garçon Wines, who seek to significantly advance wine logistics, packaging and sustainability with its flat, PET wine bottles.

“Current wine transit cases that used to transport 6 or 12 bottles of wine are inefficient and ineffective, resulting in unnecessarily costly logistics, excessive packaging, wasted resources and a grotesque carbon footprint. This is because the bottles being used are not fit for purpose in the 21st-century world of e-commerce, complex supply chains, a global world, and most importantly, climate change,” says Santiago Navarro, CEO & Co-Founder of Garçon Wines.

“The problems stemming from an unsuitable primary pack – a 19th-century wine bottle – are amplified into secondary packaging that is equally, or arguably excessively, unsuitable,” he notes.

Garçon Wines flat wine bottle (left) and Garçon Wines 10 Flat Bottle Case (right) – N.B. the case side panel cut-out is to show the case internal orientation of the bottles and is for demonstration purposes only.In the new secondary packaging suitable for transit, the bottles are arranged as to make use of all the free space in the case. Eight bottles are packed vertically and two are lying horizontally in the airspace around the bottlenecks. The space-saving solution is possible due to the special design of the Garçon Wines slimline bottle. 

The width of eight bottles stacked next to each other is equivalent to the length of one bottle, while the breadth and depth of a single bottle are the same as the area around the bottleneck.

The case is additionally 55 percent spatially smaller than an average 6 round bottles case. This attribute allows for each pallet loaded with 10 Flat Bottle Cases to carry 1,040 bottles of wine in comparison with a standard pallet with 6 round, glass bottles cases which would carry just 456 bottles of wine. This means that costs are lowered in terms of packaging, warehouse handling and storage, as well as transport.

On an example consignment of 50,000 bottles of wine, the Garçon Wines flat wine bottle and accompanying 10 Flat Bottle Case would cut packaging costs for the case in half – from 10p to 5p per bottle, saving over £2,600 (US$3.465) the company says. 

When it comes to transport, for a consignment of the same size, the 10 Flat Bottle Case would significantly reduce the need for HGVs (heavy goods vehicles which take a standard 24 pallets) from five HGVs to just two. This translates into reduced carbon emissions and costs by at least 60 percent. 

Taking into account data from a Loughborough University paper stating that a single HGV on average emits 1.5kgs of CO2/km, then the removal of 3 HGVs would cut 4.5kgs of CO2/km. If the UK were to switch half its annual wine consumption to flat bottles and flat cases, then this would mean a reduction of approximately 42,000 HGVs annually used to transport wine which would slash CO2 emissions and business costs from the supply chain.

Flat wine bottles
Garçon Wines’ flat wine bottles, made of 100 percent post-consumer recycled (PCR) PET in the UK by RPC M&H Plastics, are 40 percent more spatially efficient than round, glass bottles when packed next to each other, the company notes. 

“Our innovation presents a solution to a real-world problem. Round, glass bottles have remained relatively unchanged since the 19th century. However, the sales and supply of wine have changed significantly since then. The traditional bottles, which consumers know and like, work well from an emotional perspective – they look beautiful on a dining table – but from a functional perspective they’re not fit for purpose for distance selling and home delivery,” Navarro tells PackagingInsights. 

“We wanted to come up with a new primary packaging format, one that was best suited for e-commerce and home delivery, looked beautiful on a dining table and was also sustainable. One way of looking at it is taking a cross section of the wine bottle shape and this ensured that the resulting design would look like the bottles we all know and love.”