Britvic, is a key player in a market that consumes almost ten billion liters of soft drinks every year, it is one of the leading soft drink and fruit juice manufacturers in the United Kingdom, Europe and Brazil.
Each year, Britvic produces enough cans of soft drinks to stretch three times around the globe, and each day, the company sells nearly five million liters of soft drinks.
Britvic has facilities throughout the UK, and supplies to over a quarter of a million retailers. They sell more than 1.1 billion liters of ready-to-drink soft drinks every year in nearly 400 different shapes, sizes, and flavors.
Britvics main laboratory in Chelmsford, Essex, UK, performs assessments of consumer research, complaints, troubleshooting, testing and development, and monitoring of water quality.
Their long history extends back to Victorian England – The British Vitamin Products Company, from which Britvic takes its abbreviated name, was founded in the mid-nineteenth century. Not unusual for a soft drink producer of the time, the company began as a home business which was operated from a chemist’s shop. Soon, the company was creating all types of originally made soft drinks, including mineral waters, tonics, lemonades, and non-alcoholic ales.
Today, Britvic covers a wide scope of leading brands, including R Whites, Tango, and the UK franchises for 7UP and Pepsi, in addition to the UK’s ninth biggest grocery brand, Robinson’s. Supplementing their core brands is a variety of other drinks, including Amé, Aqua Libra, Idris, and Purdey’s, in addition to the Britvic brand.
Key Challenges
Britvic, which processes over 20,000 samples each year, have employed LabVantage LIMS products and services for over ten years. As their business continues to expand, so do the needs of its labs, increasing the demand to upgrade to newer versions of LabVantage LIMS.
Key Benefits
Britvic, which is utilizing LabVantage to optimize the service it currently supplies to its production and development areas, expects to:
- Produce more flexible, effective reports which include images, which will be especially useful in microbial identification and foreign body analysis.
- Attain quicker, more automated booking, especially of large batches of samples, using the grids.
- Track samples and recognize bottlenecks in the workload, which Britvic is unable to do at present.
- Be able to automatically email confirmation of sample receipt, instead of needing to contact customers by phone.
- Expand with the lab more easily than the current system.
- Gain enhanced data tracking. A key advantage will be the ability to easily generate ad hoc reports for customers on request. This is a service Britvic cannot provide currently.
- Replace the microbiology lab’s paper system, massively decreasing the time spent on clerical duties, while supporting UKAS accreditation much more effectively than Britvic’s current system of paper logbooks.
This information has been sourced, reviewed and adapted from materials provided by LabVantage Solutions, Inc.
For more information on this source, please visit LabVantage Solutions, Inc.