Garçon Wines bottles up sustainability for the wine industry
Packaging Solutions
Garçon Wines, the inventor of flat wine bottles is ‘advancing wine packaging into the 21st century, creating an innovative and truly sustainable wine bottle that makes the planet healthier, industry wealthier and society happier’. To this end, they enlisted the help of DS Smith to reflect this ambition in their secondary packaging.
The multi-award winning, slimline bottles are made from 100% post consumer recycled PET plastic. The new shape and material results in bottles that are 87% lighter and 40% more spatially efficient than an average round, glass bottle of the same volume. These weight and space savings mean they are considerably more efficient to transport, slashing logistics costs and CO2 emissions from the wine supply chain. Importantly, and unlike other alternative wine packaging formats, the bottles look beautiful and respect the heritage and tradition of the wine industry. The bottles are also fully and easily recyclable after use.
Originally developed by co-founders Santiago Navarro and Joe Revell to facilitate the hassle free delivery of wine into UK homes via the letterbox, Garçon Wines set out to improve consumer convenience and help reduce the 900,000 kgs of carbon emissions associated with missed deliveries in the UK.
Alisdair Easton, general manager at Garçon Wines, explained: ‘Round glass wine bottles that are fragile, heavy and spatially inefficient are, in our view, no longer fit for purpose in a 21st century world of online sales, complex supply chains, resource scarcity and most importantly, climate change.’
The company’s first project with DS Smith was to create a single bottle postal pack for online sales. It needed to be thin enough to fit through an average UK letterbox but strong enough to protect the bottle and ensure it arrived free from any damage.
Alisdair continued, ‘We needed to find a packaging partner that could work with this innovative brief and, because of the global interest in the design, also manage the international scale and scope of the potential business, helping us create a world class product. As an industry leader, DS Smith was able to offer all the above. Thanks to their collaborative approach, the end design was exactly what we planned for and we immediately received resoundingly positive feedback from our partners in gifting and online wine.’
The single bottle postal pack is made from a combination of FSC certified corrugated materials for the outer liner and recycled fibres for the remainder of the pack. This ensures the packaging reflects the sustainable ethos of Garçon Wines, who place a strong focus on designing products that use the right materials, responsibly.
