The £300M turnover site had the capacity for up to six Tassimo coffee capsule production lines, following the installation of two new lines later this year, said the plant’s director Paul Sinclair.
Each line can produce up to 350M coffee pods a year, which are used in home-brewing coffee capsule machines, and would be used to boost the site’s exports.
“The building where we’re putting in the two new lines has space for a third and then the adjacent building has space to house another three,” said Sinclair.
'It's an achieveable ambition'
“It’s an achievable ambition. If we can run the first two lines efficiently from commissioning in the autumn, then I would be confident we would get further lines.”
The investment would also signal the company’s response to the declining instant coffee market, which saw a dip in sales volumes of 4% last year, said Sinclair. However, Mondelz’s coffee capsule revenues grew by 70% in 2014, which offset that decline, he added.
Despite the growth, the UK’s coffee capsule market was small in comparison to other European countries, Sinclair said: “About 10% of UK households have a coffee capsule machine of some sort, compared with 70% of households in Switzerland or Holland and 40–50% in France and Germany, so there’s a lot of work to be done.”
Read the Me and My Factory interview with Sinclair first published in our sister publication, the monthly magazine, Food Manufacture here.