Carlsberg Bulgaria installs filling technology for its canning line

For the first time ever, Carlsberg Bulgaria is canning its own beer — thanks to technology from KHS.

The making of beer has been a long tradition in Bulgaria. Back in 1882, brewer Franz Milde opened what’s now one of Bulgaria’s oldest breweries in the city of Shumen in the east of the country. Nationalised in 1944, Shumensko Pivo, as the company called itself, produced around 350,000 hectolitres of beer per year in the 1960s — in part with the aid of a filling system imported from the former German Democratic Republic. Re-privatised in 1999, Shumensko became part of the Carlsberg Group in 2002 — together with Pirinsko Pivo, which was established in 1967. Based in Blagoevgrad, near the border with North Macedonia and Greece, this company was already brewing around 400,000 hectolitres of beer per year by 1980.

In 2004, the two entities merged under the name of Carlsberg Bulgaria to create one of the country’s leading beverage companies. Today, the two sites jointly fill well over two million hectolitres of beer per year. This output includes two local traditional beers: Pirinsko, the leader on the domestic market, and Shumensko, the country’s third most popular beer. The international portfolio also includes the Danish premium brand Tuborg, Žatecký, which is brewed with Czech hops, as well as 1664 Blanc, Budweiser, Erdinger and Grimbergen, which the company distributes. Somersby Cider and the mixed beer beverage Garage round off the range.

The brewery fills more than half of its products into PET bottles and around a quarter into returnable glass bottles. Sales of beverages in cans especially have risen heavily over the past few years. “Cans give consumers one key benefit,” said Metodi Stoyanov, Integrated Supply Chain Director and the man responsible for local supply chain management and production optimisation. “Unlike returnable glass bottles, they don’t have to be returned to the retailer but can instead simply be recycled through the recycling loop.”

Previously its filled beer cans were imported, but now Carlsberg has its own line in Blagoevgrad for the first time since January 2023. Delivered and installed by KHS, the system has the capacity to fill up to 40,000 500- and 550-mL or 60,000 330-mL cans per hour. Stoyanov is pleased with the new line. “We need far less room for can filling than we do for filling PET and glass bottles. Given the limited space available to us, that’s one advantage, of course. What’s more, the KHS machines are less complex, making them easier to both operate and maintain. Production thus runs smoothly and without any issues. I’m particularly delighted with the high level of efficiency: we achieve an OEE of 76%,” Stoyanov said.

Unlike most canning lines, which use tunnel pasteurisers for microbiological safety, the Bulgarian site consciously opted for the KHS Innopro KZE flash pasteuriser. “We don’t can any sensitive beverages that we’d need a tunnel pasteuriser for,” Stoyanov said. “Thanks to our high hygiene standards during the filling process, we’re instead able to use a flash pasteuriser on all of our systems. This improves the taste of our products. It also takes up far less space. And thanks to the faster heat transfer, we use less energy.” Stoyanov is pleased with the overall low energy consumption of the new line and all the performance values meet with expectations.

Following the filling process, the cans pass through the KHS Innopas WICG compact heater. Frank Schneidermann, Global Key Account Manager at KHS, explains the reason for this. “The containers are filled with cold beer at a temperature of 8 to 10°C. Our compact heater raises their temperature to 20 to 28°C to prevent the formation of condensation. This can dampen the cardboard used for the trays and layer pads on the pallets, potentially leading to unhygienic mould growth. Wet cardboard can also make the pallets less stable and put their proper storage and safe transportation at risk. Given the increasingly demanding nature of logistics processes, this is an important topic — including at Carlsberg Bulgaria, where after coming off the line, the packs are transported by pallet lift to a storage area located four metres below the production shop.”

To ensure that the machines remain fully functional over time, a three-year service contract was also entered into. This includes both predictive maintenance and ReDiS, the remote service that makes it possible to directly and quickly eliminate faults, even from afar — without needing a KHS service engineer to be physically present onsite.

Top image caption: Metodi Stoyanov, Carlsberg Bulgaria (left) and Plamen Zhelev, KHS.