Britvic: AWS and IoT for Sustainable Soft Drinks

More than 100 litres per capita of soft drinks are consumed each year and the industry worldwide generates revenues of around US$84.2bn.
The manufacturing, transport and packaging of these drinks can have a huge environmental impact, particularly where single-use plastic bottles are discarded.
Britvic is a British soft drinks company that produces drinks including PepsiCo brands, Tango and Aqua Libra and was recently purchased by Carlsberg Group to create a new business called Carlsberg Britvic.
IoT harnessed for sustainability
Britvic has partnered with AWS and IoT provider Wireless Logic to produce Aqua Libra Flavour Taps that provide soft drinks without any packaging.
The partnership will include IoT technologies for real-time data collection.
Malcolm McDermott, Brand Lead for Aqua Libra at Britvic, says: “The really common sense view is why have more packaging than you need.
“I think that a lot of this comes from new ways of consumers interacting with drinks.
“People are demanding more, for instance, out of what they get in the workplace. They are demanding higher quality sources of water when they're out and about.
“What can you do that takes advantage of the new trends, but also of new technologies in order to be able to deliver more of the drinks that people want when they're out and about in ways that don't just immediately jump to using the traditional packaging methods that you might have done.”
How the Aqua Libra Flavour Tap works
The Aqua Libra Flavour Tap is a digital dispenser that provides Aqua Libra soft drinks without any packaging.
It can provide sugar-free and additive-free flavours like Cucumber, Mint & Lime and Raspberry & Peach.
The tap is tailored for workplaces, hospitality and retail environments where people can simply fill a reusable container with the beverages.
Each machine is made from recycled plastic components and equipped with six flavour cartridges that are capable of saving up to 10,000 single-use plastic bottles or cans before any replacement.
How can real time data help sustainability?
Real-time data from the Flavour Taps covers lots of different information, such as how often people are having drinks, when drinks are consumed and what flavours are preferred.
Malcolm explains: “What has been really interesting is what we can do with that data to start to predict usage patterns or make it easier for us to deliver the consumables for our product.
“We still use cartridges that are the equivalent of 2,000 traditional drinks in one cartridge, so there's a massive efficiency saving there.
“Being able to use the data to work out when we need to ship those to site and not having to rely on traditional supply chains allows us to use a variety of different methods like the post which makes us more reliable.
The Flavour Tap’s IoT integration will provide even more information that can be used for sustainability.
“It's also a smart cartridge and it's tracked by NFC. What that means is that we can actually start to track that at the end of life as well,” says Jack Drinkwater, Business Development Manager at Wireless Logic.
“If you look at sustainability, there's a huge amount of work that's going on not just in the UK but globally to help drive a more sustainable world.
“There are more and more technologies coming to market really week by week, month by month that are helping to drive that change.
“Even things right through to environment sensors and monitoring, noise pollution, light pollution sensors – these types of different applications can really make a difference and impact global sustainability.”
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