Celtic Pure Plans €5 Million Plant Expansion
Celtic Pure, the Irish mineral water company, has unveiled plans for a €5 million new bottling facility at its plant, located on the outskirts of Corcreagh in County Monaghan. The new development will create up to 60 new jobs during the construction phase of the expansion, as well as securing the future for the 50 people currently employed at the facility.
Padraig McEneaney (pictured), chief executive of Celtic Pure, comments: “The investment in our facilities will further create 25 plus new jobs, increase our annual production capacity by 65% and see our annual turnover rise twofold by 2017. Our target is to bring the business to the stage where we can target sales of €18 million to €20 million.”
He continues: “We’ve come a long way since 2000, with only two employees, supplying local customers with water in 5 litre drums. This investment is a tremendous vote of confidence in our staff who have produced and sold record volumes of bottled water last year, in Ireland and worldwide via indirect exportation to China, United Arab Emirates, USA and Australia.”
The new development will commence construction on 12 acres of adjoining land to the current premises in May of this year. The state of the art 6,600 sq m warehouse will house a technologically advanced management and tracking system, new bottling lines and additional office space for the company’s expanding workforce.
The investment will see a C02 machine with dosing unit installed which will accommodate the addition of flavoured water to the Celtic pure product range by 2017. A glass bottling line will also be installed to provide glass bottles to the food service industry with production due to commence in 2018 with an estimated 10 million glass bottles to be produced per annum.
The WCS (warehouse control system) and WMS (warehouse management system) will allow the automated packing and transfer of pallets from the production lines to the storage area via a line of robot palletisers which has output speeds of up to 7 cycles/minute. The computerised system, will ensure the latest in end-to-end traceability of each pallet using intelligent self-diagnosis and control systems of machines’ functions.
