White Rock Commercializes First Opaque Black PET Liquor Bottle from Amcor PET Packaging for its Ryan’s Cream Liqueur

The bottle is topped with a tamper-evident black 33mm polypropylene closure from Berry Plastics.

26/06/08 White Rock Distilleries, Lewiston, ME, commercializes the first opaque black polyethylene terephthalate (PET) liquor bottle. The new custom 1.75-L bottle for the company’s popular Ryan’s Irish Style Cream Liqueur is being supplied by Amcor PET Packaging.

“Creating a black PET bottle presents a unique challenge,” explains Jonathan Jarman, project engineer, Amcor. “The primary issue is that a dark, opaque color absorbs the heat differently than anything else we produce.”

In 2007, White Rock converted its smaller Ryan’s sizes 750ml and 1-L from light-brown stock glass to proprietary black glass bottles. On the heels of the success of those sizes, the company decided to also create a custom bottle for its 1.75-L size to help propel growth goals.

“We had been using a light-brown stock PET bottle for our 1.75-L size. You could see the cream liqueur through the sidewall. The time had come to extend the redesign to include our largest size. That’s when we decided to invest in custom molds that would come as close as possible to extending the look of our new glass to PET,” explains Marguerite Provandie, associate director of marketing, White Rock Distilleries.

Amcor’s work was cut out for them. In addition to the desired black opaque color, the bottle featured other structural challenges.

“For example, we have a ‘brow’ over the top of the label. It was a challenge to duplicate the glass version’s length and indentation. We also have a crest on the shoulder which had to be tweaked to achieve the desired embossing,” Provandie says.

Several of the processing challenges were solved by developing proprietary heating techniques and also by working closely with the colorant supplier, Colormatrix, Berea, OH.

“In the past, we used to focus on minimizing process adjustments. But Amcor’s culture has evolved into accommodating unique container parameters. Now, when a new project is presented to us, we expect that it is going to be different and that it will challenge our processing approach,” Jarman says.

The bottle label also sports new graphics that were originally developed in 2007 when the proprietary glass bottles were being launched.

“We were looking for more of an upscale look then the previous design. The typeface and imagery we chose combines a traditional Irish look with an ‘old world’ feel,” explains Provandie.

The bottle is topped with a tamper-evident black 33mm polypropylene closure from Berry Plastics.