When foodservice accounts ask if they can sell your product, you know you have a hit.

 

Stacked Wines LLC’s four packs of single-serve, stemless wine glasses in PET had barely reached retail shelves in Los Angeles and Orange counties when the call came from Indianapolis. Officials at Lucas Oil Field, home of the Colts football club, wanted to add Stacked Wines containers to their vendors’ trays. “They came to us,” reports Matt Zimmer, Stacked Wines cofounder, adding, “they were excited to be able to throw wine into the vendors’ carts,” along with beer.

 

The four-packs of chardonnay, merlot and pinot grigio have a suggested retail price of $14.99 and are shrink sleeved. The stack is the same height as a typical 750ml bottle of wine. When the sleeve is unzipped along a vertical perforation, the 6.3-oz. glasses remain stacked, thanks to a snap-together feature suggested by R&D/Leverage, the Lee’s Summit, MO tool and dye maker that made the tooling for the blowmold machine.

 

“When Matt and his team came to us, they already had a design for the stemless glass,” recalls Project Engineer Jeff Beason. “We proposed the snap feature as a bonus.” Five months later, a unit tool was delivered for testing by a copacker, and a production tool was shipped in November.

 

Stacked Wines is getting 14-16 months of shelf life, Zimmer says, long enough to distribute the product nationally. 

 

Table wine and the stacking feature distinguish the product from Copa di Vino. Those individual servings feature higher-quality wine and a PET glass with a rounded rim (see “Less waste, more innovation in DuPont awards,” Food Engineering, July 2010). Oxygen-free filling is critical, and Copa di Vino’s developers partnered with a French engineer who designed a controlled-atmosphere, vacuum-seal filling and lidding system. Oxygen scavengers in the PET matrix also are important for shelf life.

 

For more information:

Jeff Beason, R&D/Leverage, 816-525-0353, jbeason@rdleverage.com