We’re proud the sustainable composite beverage carrier, which we developed together with the AB InBev team, is a finalist for a JEC Composites Innovation Award 2020. Already since 1996, the JEC group yearly rewards the most innovative composite applications, meant to inspire the whole industry. For this year, the jury pre-selected 33 finalists in eleven categories and they will choose a winner in each category. Besides, there is an online voting process selecting the second-place winners. The jury will announce the award winners at the official awards ceremony during JEC World 2020 in Paris on Wednesday, March fourth, and fifth, 2020.
We are a long-time strategic partner of AB InBev, working on quite a lot of projects for their brands. For specific markets (e.g. the Mexican market) the multinational wanted to develop sustainable, high-quality alternatives for expensive plastic crates or fragile cardboard options. From the very first step of this exciting project, we were involved as a design and engineering partner. We guided the AB InBev team from the early brainstorms to the final crate, with ideation, material experiments, prototyping, and producibility. Besides that, we worked on the functionality, ergonomics, and branding of the crate.
The design process was very iterative: since the material is so new, we had to test every new solution we came up with. It was an intensive trial and error process of continuous trying, testing, and adjusting. We are proud of the result: a new innovative composite crate design. It’s is lightweight and convenient, reusable, returnable and recyclable, and has a high versatility creating branding opportunities. Ready for a global rollout.
Thanks AB InBev team for a great collaboration! Are you just as enthusiastic as we are about our innovative solution? Please help us win! Vote easily on http://innovationawards.jec-world.events. We’ll keep our fingers crossed and, of course, will keep you informed on the outcome.