Manufacturing
Coca-Cola and many of our other soft drinks start life as a base syrup. Very few people know the secret recipe of a Coke and to protect it, the syrup arrives at our GB factories in two parts, which need to be mixed in the right proportions.
Once mixed, we dilute the syrup with water and add sugar or sweetener to it before adding fizz to it, if it's sparkling, with carbon dioxide and filling and packing bottles or cans ready to be delivered to our customers.
Our secret recipe syrups are made in Ireland before being shipped to Great Britain.
- From start to finish it takes about two hours to make a soft drink
- We make our soft drinks in batches of around 100,000 litres
- Our various factories have different lines making different kinds of pack type and size
- Our fastest canning line fills 2,000 cans a minute
- Our fastest bottling line fills 500 2 litre bottles a minute
- Our factory in Wakefield is the biggest soft drinks factory in Europe, if not the world, and it has just celebrated 20 years of business. 40 employees will also celebrate 20 years of working life at the factory!
- Many of our factories operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week
- We do work with a small number of specialist packers in Great Britain to make some of our drinks in tetrapak cartons - for example Five Alive
- All of our sites are reducing energy and water use and recycle as much waste as possible - two of them are already 'Zero Waste'.
