We may take for granted that we can pluck an Argentinian Malbec or a Californian Sauvignon from the shelf during our weekly supermarket shop. But before we purchase the plonk, before it even arrives on the shelves, these wines travel through long and winding supply chains with plenty of opportunities for wastage.
The penultimate stop is bottling. Encirc is one of the main companies packaging up tipple in the UK. In fact, 40% of all Britain’s booze – about 400 million litres – sloshes through Encirc’s three bottling sites across the UK and Northern Ireland.
Until recently, 2% of all that liquid went to waste. That may sound insignificant, but it amounts to 8 million litres of beer, wine and spirits that may as well have been poured down the drain.
How AI can be used to reduce waste
By industry standards, 2% wastage is pretty good. Still, the company’s leadership believed they could reduce that figure with the right technology, says Robin Thompson, head of technical initiatives at Encirc. After building various production-line software, his team developed Wineview, a predictive analytics tool that is integrated into production lines and uses historical data to produce insights about wastage.
Wastage levels are determined by several factors, including the product line, type of packaging and time of day or week it is packaged. “All of this is brought into an equation which gives information to the team on that line,” Thompson says. The tool then suggests actions to improve the yields or returns based on particular factors the team can influence.
Reducing spillage is an obvious way to preserve more product. But improving bottling precision is also important. Encirc’s system accurately measures the amount of wine poured into each bottle and suggests tiny measurement adjustments to maximise yields, all while ensuring each bottle is filled to the level required by law. For instance, it could instruct line operators in real time to adjust average fill heights by as little as half a millimetre.
“If you leave that to the end of a run you’ll have no influence, but if you make an adjustment in the first 15 minutes of production, it makes a big difference,” says Thompson.
Businesses typically must wait for the bottling run to finish before measuring the amount of liquid wasted. But Wineview makes that information available from the start. It both predicts outcomes based on current configurations and identifies opportunities for greater efficiency, Thompson adds. By fine-tuning the software, Encirc has more than halved its wastage – down to less than 1% of total volume.
Other areas where AI can improve operations
Drinkers in the UK may have noticed that the strength of the average tipple is in decline. Compare, for instance, a 4.6% Madri – the British-brewed lager with Spanish-style marketing from Coors – with Madrid’s own 5.1% Mahou.
A 2023 restructure of alcohol taxation in the UK raised the duty on alcohol and introduced different tax bands for drinks according to alcohol by volume. Keen to avoid higher duty costs, UK brewers are producing lower-strength products – a trend known as drinkflation. This is creating new challenges for suppliers.
Pure alcohol is a natural preservative. If the level of alcohol in, say, a bottle of Merlot is reduced from 14% to 7%, it will be less protected from bacteria, which can spoil the product. The risk of bacterial spoilage increases as the wine is transported along the supply chain, enduring fluctuations in temperature and humidity.
“When wine arrives in the UK, our monitoring and testing has to step up accordingly,” says Thompson, adding that the company employs on-site wine tasters for quality control. “We have to increase the number and types of checks that we do and pay a lot more attention to our regimes – you haven’t got many options with wine. You’ve got sulfur dioxide [an antimicrobial], so our ability to measure and adjust that becomes very important.”
Microfiltration is also important for managing the new wave of low-strength wines. In this process, the wine is passed through a membrane filter to clarify liquid and eliminate micro-organisms and other potential contaminants. Any flaws in the filtration unit can impact the quality of the wine. For Thompson’s team, the next task is to bring predictive analytics into the filtration systems to identify errors and anticipate maintenance needs.
Thompson explains: “Rather than getting to the end of a run, then doing the testing and finding out three days later that you’ve got a problem, you could use predictive software that tells you to stop production and clean the filters. That’s an area we’re exploring now.”
We may take for granted that we can pluck an Argentinian Malbec or a Californian Sauvignon from the shelf during our weekly supermarket shop. But before we purchase the plonk, before it even arrives on the shelves, these wines travel through long and winding supply chains with plenty of opportunities for wastage.
The penultimate stop is bottling. Encirc is one of the main companies packaging up tipple in the UK. In fact, 40% of all Britain's booze – about 400 million litres – sloshes through Encirc’s three bottling sites across the UK and Northern Ireland.
Until recently, 2% of all that liquid went to waste. That may sound insignificant, but it amounts to 8 million litres of beer, wine and spirits that may as well have been poured down the drain.
