Why Conveyor Reliability Is the Hidden Driver of Beverage Line Performance
Ask any production manager on a UK canning, bottling and PET line what keeps them up at night, and the answer is rarely the filler. It’ s the unplanned stop that brings an entire operation to a halt during peak season, against a committed customer order, with no contingency in the schedule. Often, the root cause isn’ t the headline capital equipment, it’ s the conveyor system.
Yet in the hierarchy of planned maintenance, they are routinely last in the queue. Scheduled shutdown days are consumed by the filler, the labeller, the assets that carry the greatest perceived risk. The conveyors run constantly in the background, left to carry on, until they can’ t.
UK beverage producers routinely run at 99 % of available production capacity, meaning a single unplanned stop has an immediate and disproportionate commercial impact. The average cost of one hour’ s unplanned downtime across can, bottle and PET lines, can cost up
22 FDPP- www. fdpp. co. uk to € 200,000 per hour for a highspeed beverage production line.
This is nearly always entirely preventable as conveyor failures are rarely sudden.
Regal Rexnord’ s Premium Services Offering is designed to interrupt that cycle. At its core is a comprehensive on-site reliability survey, carried out during a planned shutdown by Regal Rexnord’ s specialist engineers. Every conveyor asset on the line, chains, belts, sprockets and curves, are physically assessed for wear, damage and elongation, tagged with a QR code, and logged to a central database accessible via a dedicated customer portal or mobile app.
The output is a live, asset-level picture of the entire line, with each component assigned a status on a traffic light system: green for healthy, amber for monitored, red for action required. Rather than working from instinct or historical habit, engineers have an accurate baseline they can return to year on year, update as replacements are made and build a credible case for maintenance investment at budget time.
A reliable assessment framework is only valuable if it can be acted on. For UK producers, that means having the right components available when the maintenance window arrives.
Brewpack serves as Regal Rexnord’ s dedicated UK supply partner, providing direct access to genuine replacement parts and components for canning, bottling and PET operations across the country. When a component moves from green to amber in the system and a shutdown window is approaching, Brewpack’ s local availability ensures the plan holds.
To find out more, contact Regal Rexnord and Brewpack today. Visit: www2. regalrexnord. com / l / 464072 / 2026-04-09 / 6f5hsm