Craft beer has surged in popularity in recent years, and now nearly every city and town around the country boasts at least one unique and edgy craft brewery that provides residents with local craft beer. Victory Brewing in Downingtown, PA, for instance, was founded by childhood friends with a shared passion for good beer and access to home brewing equipment. Victory Brewing Company opened its doors in 1996, a few years before the craft beer craze really started to take hold of the country. Since then, Victory has grown from a 144-seat restaurant to a 300-seat restaurant that produced 125,713 barrels of beer in 2014 alone!
Part of Victory Brewing’s success can be attributed to how well its owners have listened to their customers’ wishes. A few years ago, it became evident that consumers were eager to enjoy craft beer in cans as well as bottles, so Victory Brewing immediately went to work meeting that request. As VP Brewing Operations Scott Dietrich explained, “We’ve been talking about it off and on for about the past three years, watching to see what it was that consumers want. Portable and non-breakable is what they wanted, and it was pretty clear that an aluminum can was the format they were gravitating toward.”
In the end, Victory chose Econocorp as one of their packaging equipment suppliers to make canned craft beer a reality. “Their niche is in that range of 30 to 40 cartons a minute. We have two of their machines on the line,” according to Dietrich. The first machine, the Spartan Cartoner, erects paperboard cartons and inserts either four, six, 12, or 24 cans, then uses a glue dauber to glue the cartons shut. Victory’s second Econocorp machine, the Spartan Wraparound Traypacker, pushes either two 12-packs, four six-packs, or six four-packs onto a corrugated tray to folded around the cartons.
As Victory Brewing’s growth proves, the irresistible taste of craft beer needs to be matched with high-quality packaging that consumers find valuable and convenient. Econocorp offers the machinery to make it happen. Call (781) 986-7500 to learn more about how Econocorp can support the growth of your own business by providing superior packaging machines.