Xenos wins beverage awards

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Xenos factory

For Immediate Release March 08, 2007

NZ drinks manufacturer not just another brik in the wall

Palmerston North specialist drinks manufacturer Xenos Ltd has cleaned up at the 2006 New Zealand Juice and Beverage Association Awards, winning six titles and beating multinationals including Coca Cola and Frucor in the process.

Xenos won the NZ (owned company) and Open Energy and Lifestyle Beverages categories for its own-brand drink Xenegy, a healthy energy snack drink. Xenegy also won the NZ Youth Choice category.

Xenos also contract-manufactures carrot juices and a range of yoghurt smoothies for the Arano brand. Its carrot juice won the NZ and Open Vegetable Juice categories and the Yoghurt, Honey and Vanilla Bean Smoothie won the NZ Smoothie category.

Xenos Managing Director Mike Rockell says, “The awards have been a tremendous boost for our credibility as we move into a new growth phase.”

A week after winning the awards, Xenos exhibited at the Food Tech Pack Tech food packaging trade show in Auckland, where its cold-fill aseptic processing system and specialist contract manufacturing capability attracted high levels of interest from major New Zealand beverage companies.

Xenos has developed proprietary world-first technology to pack UHT beverages into bottles aseptically. Products that currently need to be packaged in the less appealing tetra brik style boxes, in order to achieve extended shelf life, can now be packed into plastic or glass bottles. This markedly increases the consumer appeal for many upmarket products and so increases the range of new products that consumer beverage companies can now bring to market, says Mr Rockell.

“There are European-manufactured aseptic bottle fillers, but they are very large and very expensive, whereas Xenos’s compact flexible equipment enables beverage companies to enter new markets with low risk, because it can do small-scale production runs,” he says

Another key difference is that Xenos can package products into different-sized bottles, whereas tetra-brik equipment can typically only make packaging in one size. These points of difference mean that Xenos is “not just another brik in the wall,” Mr Rockell says.

Xenos is another success story for Manawatu’s The Bio Commerce Centre, a business incubator that is focused on keeping world-class technological innovation in the region.

“Xenos is a young, innovative company that came into incubation 18 months ago, set up its manufacturing facility, and is achieving excellence with a clutch of awards to show for it,“ says Incubator Manager Brenda Lazelle. Xenos is now looking at large New Zealand manufacturers and, long-term, plans to expand its operation overseas.

ENDS

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