Case study

Courage

Maintaining brand leadership through technical ‘widget’ innovation

Courage, the major brewer, faced declining market share for its canned beers in the competitive, UK take-home sector. It needed unique ‘widget’ technology to create a traditional ‘head’ on the beer - a feature which competitor products possessed.

PA enabled Courage to develop and launch its own, exclusive ‘widget’ in under a year. PA developed the widget design from initial technical concept generation, through bench testing and tooling development, to full-scale manufacture and introduction to the supplier.

The need for flexible manufacturing dictated that PA help set up and commission a new business unit for off-line insertion of widgets into empty cans. This was established with the close co-operation of another key supplier. New equipment was also needed on the canning line to process the widgeted cans. To meet the demanding timescale, PA developed and built this special purpose equipment at its Cambridge Technology Centre. A major achievement was the design, test and introduction of this new operation onto the high speed canning lines without significant downtime, while maintaining the rated canning speed.