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. More often than the industry tends to acknowledge, the root cause isn’t the headline capital equipment, it’s the conveyor system.
Conveyors are the connective tissue of a beverage line, linking every stage of production. Yet in the hierarchy of planned maintenance, they are routinely last in the queue. Scheduled shutdown days are consumed by the filler, the labeller and the assets that carry the greatest perceived risk. The conveyors run constantly in the background, left to carry on, until they can’t.
The numbers behind the problem
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 unplanned downtime across canning, bottling and PET lines, can cost up to €200,000 per hour for a high-speed beverage production line. This is nearly always entirely preventable as conveyor failures are rarely sudden, they are the predictable result of wear that has gone undetected and unmeasured.
Local supply, without the lead time risk
Having the right components in place is the first step for any manufacturer serious about avoiding downtime. When parts do need replacing, waiting weeks for them to arrive is not an option.
Brewpack serves as Regal Rexnord’s dedicated UK preferred partner, providing direct access to genuine replacement parts and components for canning, bottling and PET operations across the country. But having the right components available is only valuable if you know what needs replacing, and when, that’s precisely what Regal Rexnord’s Premium Services Offering is designed to tell you.
What the Premium Services Offering actually looks like
Poor accumulation, unstable container transfers, misaligned guides are not random events, they are the visible symptoms of gradual wear that has gone unmeasured, and they escalate predictably. A subtle misalignment becomes an unstable transfer, an unstable transfer causes container damage, damaged containers trigger a line stop, a product rejection, and a maintenance call that could have been a scheduled parts order.
Regal Rexnord’s Premium Services Offering is designed specifically 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, 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. For engineering managers, this transforms the maintenance conversation entirely. Rather than working from instinct or historical habit, they have an accurate baseline, a document they can return to year on year, update as replacements are made and build a credible case for maintenance investment at budget time.
For critical individual assets such as pasteurisers, the service goes further. Belt modules are physically removed and lab-tested by Brewpack and Regal Rexnord engineers to assess brittleness and residual strength, the kind of degradation that isn’t visible to the naked eye but is accelerated significantly by the high temperatures and chemical exposure these machines operate under. The result is a precise prediction of remaining belt life, and a clear window in which to act before failure, rather than after it.
The financial case for getting ahead of it
The economics of planned versus reactive maintenance are stark. An emergency component replacement, sourced urgently, shipped at speed, fitted outside of any scheduled window, carries a cost premium that extends well beyond the part price. Expedited logistics, overtime labour, and the knock-on effect of lost production time all compound. When the same work is scheduled in advance, inside a shutdown window that was already in the calendar, the cost profile changes entirely.
There is also a longer-term dimension. Regal Rexnord’s survey data supports SKU rationalisation, identifying where part types can be consolidated across multiple lines to simplify inventory and reduce the working capital tied up in spare components. For operations managing several lines across a single site, that rationalisation alone can represent meaningful cost reduction.
Keeping every link in the chain
The beverage lines that consistently outperform are not always the ones with the newest equipment. They are the ones run by teams who understand that sustained throughput is a system-level challenge, and that the conveyors connecting every stage of that system deserve the same rigour applied to the equipment they serve.
Regal Rexnord’s Premium Services Offering provides the engineering framework to assess, prioritise, and plan while Brewpack provides the UK supply chain to execute. Together, we give producers a genuine route from reactive maintenance to strategic reliability.
To find out more, contact Regal Rexnord and Brewpack today. Visit: https://www2.regalrexnord.com/l/464072/2026-04-09/6f5hsm
