William Grant & Sons Ltd. is an independent, family-owned Scottish company which distills Scotch whisky and other selected categories of spirits. It was founded in 1886 by William Grant, and is now run by the descendants of the founder. It is the largest of the handful of Scotch whisky distillers remaining in family ownership. The company is the 3rd largest producer of Scotch whisky after Diageo and Pernod Ricard. The company's central headquarters are in Strathclyde Business Park, near Glasgow. Sales and marketing headquarters are in Richmond, London. The master blender of Grant's is David Stewart, who has been in his post for 42 years, the longest serving master blender with one distiller in the industry. The company's leading single malt Scotch brand is Glenfiddich, the best-selling brand in the worldwide single malt Scotch market. Their leading blended Scotch brand is Grant's, the 4th best- selling brand in the worldwide blended Scotch market and the Scotch market as a whole.
William Grant has turned to Procomac as a supplier for a new line to handle the bottling of its top-of-the-line single malt whisky, the Glenfiddich. For this Project Procomac has supplied William Grant with a filling line for whisky in glass bottles for a production capacity of 12.000 bph. The line can treat different bottle formats: 350 ml, 375 ml, 700 ml, 750 ml and 1000 ml in the traditional triangular form that characterizes a significant percentage of the Grant's whiskey production. A new bloc concept was developed with this project, called the Excel Bloc. The rinser, filler and capper are mounted on a minimal structure featuring inclined surfaces. Glass guards are not integrated on this structure; they are instead fixed to the ground and separated from the machine. In this way, the highest degree of accessibility is obtained, as well as a transparent look that fits very well with theoperational requirements: nothing is hidden from the view, every component is within reach of the operator. A GRIPSTAR "product rinser" is deployed to rinse the internal surface of the bottle; a Fillstar SF-M gravity filler for spirits guarantees the maximum fill level precision thanks to a low-vacuum fill level correction system. The line is completed by an Arol capper. Procomac Packaging has supplied a RESOLVIS low-level outfeed depalletiser to feed the line with empty glass bottles as well as empty and full bottle conveyors used on the line.

After the installation and the commissioning of the line we went to William Grant Customer Service Center in Strathclyde near Glasgow and met Mr. Roger Lee, Project manager, to discover some more details about this installation.

Can you tell us some data about this Customer Service Center?
In this production facility we bottle about 109 million bottles per year. Half of it is William Grant’s blended whisky, and about 10 million bottles of Glenfiddich 12 years old malt whisky.

How did the installation of the new Procomac excel line for spirits go?
The installation went very well. We had some delays very early on in the process. Procomac was very open about the fact that they had spent more time on the design to be able to tailor the project to our requirements. This meant that we held off the delivery until the machine was perfectly ready, which in hindsight will be seen as a good thing, as it solved a couple of potentially big issues that would have slowed machine installation. Then we got into commissioning with Procomac UK guys; everything went well, the only minor issue was the integration of a stand alone capsulator into the line after installation. I remarked that the Italian engineers are very experienced: they have a sometimes narrow, but very deep knowledge about the single machines, whereas Procomac UK guys are more generalist, and this is a nice combination: generalists and experts that work together.

What about the new design of the filler?
The design is very open, quite different from other manufacturers, a sort of glass fence-off design: there is little hidden, you see virtually everything that happens. This is good, you can see what really is going on, if there is a problem there is nothing hidden from the eye, which is reassuring. Another advantage is that the area you are working in is very well lighted: in general we have to put lots of floor lights over the machines, but this filler didn’t need that. I know that the design was quite a challenge for the design team, but I am very pleased with the results.

You are used to deal with different machine manufacturers. How would you value the capability of smaller companies like Procomac to follow you in a tailored project compared to other bigger manufacturers?
Part of our choice was based on the fact that William Grants is a family-run business, just like Procomac. What we found is that the medium-sized, family-owned company fitted our culture very well; you get more flexibility from companies like Procomac. We liked the fact that there always was an open door to get to the right person at Procomac. We generally didn’t need to, but we knew that if we needed, it was easy to get to discuss about an issue with the right person. Generally speaking, Procomac behaves like an open organization: there aren’t many layers of people to get across before reaching the right person.

You also have a Procomac filling line for very big bottles, like 5 liters bottles. Is it a good market for William Grant?
The market is pretty small. It is essentially used in markets like South America, Korea, Thailand, the bottle is poured using a cradle because it is quite heavy to pick up. We tend to ship most of these bottles in Asian countries.

What is your view of the Spirits business, what kind of developments do you perceive for the next future?
The whisky market has become a very competitive market. The worldwide consumption of blended whiskies in general is at best flat, whereas our single malt references like Glenfiddich are still growing. To be successful in the market for blended whiskies you have to keep working harder and harder, to reduce manufacturing cost as much as possible and to keep lines working. On the other hand there are lots of innovations around premium malt whisky and other premium spirits. What we are trying to do is to address niche markets with premium products. For example, we are putting a lot of effort into makeing premium vodka from pure Icelandic water filtered over lava rock. The product's called Reyka Vodka. Another interesting product is Hendrick's Gin, that we produce in Girvan, Scotland. We use a Carter-Head Still, built in the 19th century, of which there are only four in the world. Instead of boiling, the still uses vaporization. I see William grants trying to establish itself on these markets by the distinctive quality of these products.

(05/29/2007)