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It was four years ago that management at Moosehead Breweries Ltd. decided to benchmark their performance with the rest of the industry. After visiting brewery operations throughout Europe and crunching some numbers, “We saw some significant gaps we needed to close,” says Wayne Arsenault, vice-president of operations. “One of the major ones was controls and automation.”

Getting to an automated state is a matter of competitive survival for brewers of any size, Mr. Arsenault says. “Beer pricing is relatively stagnant, so clearly breweries need to do something to reduce costs. Larger competitors have already significantly reduced theirs. We had to react to keep up.”

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That reaction was a $21-million investment that would see Moosehead overhaul end-to-end production — from material handling and inspection to labelling and packing — at its Saint John, NB plant.

Smaller organizations don’t have access to a ton of capital so we need to be very focused on high-value innovations that improve quality and reduce costs

The productivity improvements have been substantial, Mr. Arsenault says. Consolidating two bottle lines to a single high-speed fully automated one, for example, reduced staff requirements by half, while generating the same output. The original seven labeling machines, which were individually manned, have been rolled into a single fully automated system with quality inspection capabilities that requires only a single person at the helm. On the packing side, new boxboard and six-pack systems have led to a 70% reduction in assets without putting a dent in volumes.