My name is Brad Page. My wife Kathy and I own Claudette Cider Company. We opened in 2010 and went public in April of 2011. We basically started with two ciders—a soft dry or semi-sweet, and a dry cider, all juice. Our idea was that there was a market out there, and we wanted to make ciders that weren’t really sweet like most people thought of ciders in the country, which is an odd American twist on what is typically a dry product in the rest of the world.
We opened with just a few tanks, very small, in bombers in 2011. We’ve been in this space for about six years. We transitioned for a few years to twelve-ounce bottles, but it became obvious that the market demanded cans. Colorado in particular seems to like cans because of outdoor activities and lighter packaging. I also think it’s a market that’s very accepting that cans don’t have any effect on the quality of the product. Beer obviously showed that very well with canned beers, and that’s not a problem anymore. Originally, there was a little bit of thought that canned product wasn’t quite as good, but people like Wild Goose and Ska have made things much easier.
We looked into canning about two years ago. It took us a little while to get our act together. We did mobile canning for a while, and the Ska palletizers are pretty key to making it work for us because they eliminate at least one person on the line. This makes it much easier, more sanitary, faster, and more efficient to have their pallet touch.
I think we’d like to get to the point where we need to buy more canning equipment. What we’ve bought initially will probably service us for quite a while. Their customer service has been great, and you have a lot of confidence in the equipment. They’ve been very responsive to anything you need.
For anybody looking into buying a depalletizer, they’ve probably gone through the experience we went through. We used mobile canning for a while, and they were letting the cans on one at a time. We rented a machine at Wild Goose from another brewery, and they had a fishtail loading the cans that way. It absolutely makes no sense not to buy a depalletizer. It makes life so much easier, and you can concentrate on what’s important—making sure your fills are right. I think mechanically and from overall product quality, it just removes something distracting and allows you to concentrate on having a good product. I’d recommend it highly.
