Quote:
Originally Posted by PoorLurker
You work at Walmart? That there was a great value of education.
I'd love to sit in on the meeting regarding bottle size. I wonder how long it went from that size to the new taller skinnier. How many renditions did it take to settle on the newest size.
I wish there was a show that showed the thinking process behind stuff like this.
Or a show on industrial engineering
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@ the Great Value of education. I do not work for Wal-Mart. I work for a 200 year old Japanese food manufacturing company. Not to drop names but 2 of the companies that we own rhyme with Bagu and Rertolli. We make the white distilled vinegar and bottle it for Wal-Mart; we also make variations of mustard, cooking sherry, red wine vinegar and apple-cider vinegar. Yes, it is true that many of the products stocked on grocery store shelves are the same product with different containers and labels on them. If you buy mustard that isn't French's or Heinz there is a great likelihood that it came from the facility that I work in. Side note: we do have a Wal-Mart auditor on-site today. They are a very quirky company to have as a customer. The standards they hold us to make up for a great number of our company policies.
Tons of R&D went into the skinnier bottles. First, test bottle molds are created from our bottle supplier. Once the design is approved by Wal-Mart, it is then ran through rigorous production testing for mil thickness, leakage, capping, heat tests and structural integrity. Each of these are incredibly important. At the same time this is going on, the company that we purchase our filler valves from are in the process of designing valves that are able to fill each bottle at an optimum speed to ensure production efficiency. Once the bottles and valves meet this criteria, we then do ship tests. This is to ensure that the bottles can structurally support the weight of the stack patterns required to fill truck loads of our product. If the weight of the bottles stacked on top of the bottles of the base layer crush the base layer bottles, the process starts all over again. The boxes that the cases of product are shipped in are key here also. The corrugate is not solely responsible for the weight management/distribution, the bottles themselves play a big part in this. The amount of test loads that make it to the distribution centers, where the bottles or boxes have collapsed and resulted in unusable product is very costly; considering the cost of manufacturing the product/employee labor, price of containers, corrugate pricing, freight costs and ultimately loss of product. Eventually through trial and error, we are successful in finding the all the right tolerances of each individual variable in the equation from filling of the bottles until the bottle makes it to the shelf. Once we are good to go in all these areas, then stores in selected test markets are used to track sales of these bottles compared to the regular sized gallons. At the end of the day, the more bottles we can fit on a shelf, the more vinegar we can sell, the less work it is to keep shelves stocked, the less money we spend on freight etc. All from making a bottle just a little taller and more narrow.