The tradition of making moonshine in the Smoky Mountains dates back more than 100 years. When Tennessee changed its state law, Ole Smoky was able to open its first federally licensed distillery—which crafts some of the best moonshines and whiskeys in the country.
The company brags about making “kick-in-the-mouth” moonshine that folks have loved for over a century, along with innovative moonshine flavors like Lemon Drop, Peach, Apple Pie, and Chocolate. Ole Smoky also makes whiskey and canned moonshine cocktails.
Ole Smoky’s Exploding Business
The combination of great products and savvy marketing has made Ole Smoky one of the fastest growing companies in America. In fact, in 2023, the company was named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for the fourth time.
However, behind the scenes—as demand for the company’s products was booming—operations was struggling to keep up.
Dan Denisoff, Ole Smoky’s senior vice president of operations, who has decades of experience putting liquid into bottles for some of the world’s largest beverage and spirits companies, joined the company as a consultant more than five years ago. He found a great company that was growing extremely fast, outstanding management, and a culture he loved—but a complex operation that made hundreds of SKUs, very manual operations, lack of processes, and lack of state-of-the-art equipment.
Ole Smoky wanted to be a large company but was still running its manufacturing operations like a small company.
Looking back, Denisoff described Ole Smoky’s major operational challenges as capacity issues in that the company’s operations couldn’t meet the demand that was being experienced. In addition, at the time Ole Smoky didn’t have staff members with the knowledge or expertise to solve this problem.
Ole Smoky Picks BellatRx Inc.
Recognizing that Ole Smoky couldn’t solve its operational challenges on its own, the company looked for partners that could help develop and implement a complete, end-to-end, automated, turnkey line solution.
“We needed help. There was no way we could solve this ourselves.”Dan Denisoff, SVP of Operations, Ole Smoky
Ole Smoky reached out to multiple equipment experts that specialized in automation and line integration. The key factors in this process were the quality of the equipment, the cost, and in particular, the ability to support a company of Ole Smoky’s size, complexity, and rate of growth.
Denisoff had previously heard of BellatRx. and heard positive reviews from others who knew of and had worked with BellatRx. Ole Smoky found BellatRx equipment to be high quality, felt the cost was competitive, and most important, “felt like they could support a company like Ole Smoky.” The team from BellatRx Inc. had extensive expertise in line integration and was incredibly responsive. Denisoff was extremely impressed by the interest that BellatRx took in helping Ole Smoky figure out exactly what they needed.
Designing a Custom Solution for Ole Smoky
Due to Ole Smoky’s specific needs, there was no such thing as an off-the-shelf solution; Ole Smoky required a unique custom solution.
BellatRx Inc. dove in, learning about Ole Smoky’s products, its business, its operations, its growth goals, and constraints—such as space constraints. BellatRx Inc. didn’t just provide equipment, but offered a consultative approach in helping design and implement the entire line, “from stem to stern,” said Denisoff.
Working together, BellatRx Inc. and Ole Smoky designed a line (shown below) with multiple steps and pieces of equipment. Some of the equipment was from BellatRx Inc. and some equipment was from other manufacturers.
Over a few years, implementation proceeded in three phases:
Phase 1: Filling, capping, and labeling
Phase 2: Case erector, carton forming, and case packing
Phase 3: Automated palletizers
Ole Smoky Line Integration
At each phase, BellatRx Inc. took responsibility for putting the equipment together, testing it, and implementing it—a process that Denisoff said went incredibly smoothly.
Denisoff said that working with BellatRx Inc. throughout this entire process was extremely easy. Ole Smoky and BellatRx Inc. communicated via weekly check-ins and BellatRx Inc. provided Ole Smoky a single point of contact for any issues that arose.
Achieving Amazing Results
Over the past five or six years, Ole Smoky has increased its total volume 7-fold, from 200,000 per year to more than 1.4 million cases. This growth occurred both before and during the company’s automation efforts.
Since completing the entire line integration project, Ole Smoky has:
Produced at the lowest cost per unit in the company’s history due to using automation and lowering labor costs
Achieved 100% order fulfillment for the first time, essentially eliminating stockouts
Denisoff noted that instead of constantly reacting, fighting fires, and playing catch-up, Ole Smoky is now proactive and ahead of the curve.
“We produced our lowest cost per unit ever in the history of Ole Smoky. We also had 100% order fulfillment for the first time. We have good product availability, we’re dependable, and we’re running at speed with less headcount . . . it was a significant improvement over where we were a few years ago.”
Dan Denisoff, SVP of Operations, Ole Smoky
Clever Syrup Capper & Reject System Prevents a Sticky Situation
Quebecois syrup producer Nokomis Maple Products had a big fill inconsistency and reject problem that often made a sticky mess.
An easy-to-use new capper with advanced inspection features made a big difference in reducing rejects and keeping things moving.
Nokomis Maple Products of Trois-Pistoles, Quebec, Canada, works with more than 100 maple syrup producing families who, generation after generation, carry on a profession that they learned from their ancestors. The Bas-Saint-Laurent these families call home is characterized by a harsh climate and sugar maple forests of remarkable purity, and it’s one of the most northerly places in the world to produce maple syrup. With this quality of raw ingredient, Nokomis says it offers its customers the guarantee of a real product from Quebec.
To deliver that quality product to end consumers, Nokomis offers its private label, store brands and foodservice customers a range of container sizes. Offerings span from glass bottles with integral handle between 189 and 250 mL, “solitude bottles” of 250 mL, and larger PP jugs between 500 mL and 1 L. Depending on bottle size and application, PP caps from Berry Cap, Pano Cap, Mold-Rite Plastics are used to close the bottles. But recently, problems arose with the automated application of those caps and closures. Automatic and progressive bottle-reject system for capping of liquid products
Solving for capping inefficiency
The company uses a filling machine with six volumetric filling heads. While the same amount of syrup is filled to each bottle during any given production run, there’s a natural, bottle-to-bottle variation in fill height that is explained by slight differences in the containers’ internal volumes. And while that shouldn’t necessarily create a problem, Nokomis operators were seeing a lot of rejects—more than 5%, in fact—due to an inefficient spindle capper used to torque on the caps that sits directly downstream from the filler. The legacy capping system’s six mechanical closers and two pneumatic clamping wheels left little room for operators to measure or make adjustment to address the problem.
To bring that high reject rate down to acceptable levels, Nokomis operators researched several potential capper application suppliers, eventually meeting with three machine builders to make the final selection. The company decided to replace the old capper with a Secure Chuck Capper from BellatRx, who immediately won Vince More, VP at Nokomis over with “an impeccable welcome, a solid experience for this type of machine, the fact that the Secure Check Capper is very compact, easy to adapt for changeovers, and [exhibits] excellent reliability,” he says. Plus, he adds, it’s easy to operate.
As part of the installation, Nokomis also specified a camera inspection system to inspect both cap placement and fill level. A vision system is implemented to detect any capping discrepancies and reject them. 100% of cap inspection is done before bottles are allowed to leave the capper conveyor. Additionally due to the ability of the vision to see the fill level, Nokomis implemented a fill level verification to capture discrepancies from the filling as well.
Nokomis also added an automatic, progressive reject system. Nokomis operators believe they arrived at the ideal solution for rejecting missing-cap bottles that can easily tip over and contaminate the whole packaging line with sticky, viscous maple syrup. The key was the ability to reject non-conforming bottles, whether due to cap application or fill level variance, without causing the containers to tip over and spill their content. The progressive reject system was developed and implemented to meet this challenge. 
Automatic capping machine with torque monitoring
“Previously, all rejection detection was done at the end of the line during the final quality control,” More says. “From now on, this automatic rejection system allows us to remove from the line a large part of the bottles with defects and improves the quality of the finished product. It is as if we had added another step of quality control. This avoids many problems downstream, especially at the inversion stage, because most of the bad caps are removed during this check.”
Also, within the system, recipes and setup charts were developed for the customer’s formats. Discrete locations for tooling are incorporated to avoid the need for “tweaking” during setup. By snapping tooling into place according to the charts provided, operators are ready to go in less than 15 minutes, often in less time.
Conveyors were designed to withstand periodic washdown. All bottle handling and transfers were carefully designed not to cause any bottles tipping, which would cause a spill and lengthy downtime for cleanup.
The new capper fits directly into the existing line, with downstream automation including an induction sealer from Sigma CapSeal, an inverting machine from Geninox, labelling equipment from Procepack, and coding and marking from Leibinger. Discreet adjustment points for quick changeover
Results boost production, morale
The new installation has resulted in very little rejection, less than 1%, compared to the previous spindle capper. Based on this, More says Nokomis has increased daily throughput by 20%, and now has the potential to increase another 20% over the next year. Perhaps more importantly, the company is now able to relocate employees to other areas of the production floor instead of constantly monitoring a high-reject closure applicator and cleaning up after the attendant messy spills.
Provident Nutraceutical Increases Production Through New Complete Bottling Line
Complete bottling line from BellatRx–from unscrambling to labeling–owes its success to outstanding customer care and augmented reality software.
The company turned to BellatRx–a manufacturer of complete lines and packaging equipment for the pharmaceutical and nutraceutical industries.
Provident Nutraceutical (Provident), a dietary supplement contract manufacturer, encapsulates powder into a variety of capsule sizes, which are then bottled in counts of 20 to 240. The company previously ran one bottling line for all types of products, such as capsules and tablets, out of its Steven’s Point, Wisconsin location and sought to expand and increase its capacity. Expansion would allow for the implementation of another bottling line, which would not only increase capacity but also decrease the effects of downtime in the facility if one line were to go down while the other continued to operate.
The company turned to BellatRx–a manufacturer of complete lines and packaging equipment for the pharmaceutical and nutraceutical industries, from whom Provident had purchased in the past.
“We did our due diligence of checking out a few different companies when looking into a complete bottling line and, in the end, we liked what BellatRx offered and we knew how they stand behind their product and the service they provide,” says Eric Peterson, maintenance and project manager at Provident.
The company bought a complete bottling line, which included:
- Bell-Sort unscrambler to orient bottles in the upright position onto the conveyor
- A reject station that removes bottles that are upside down or tipped over
- Rx-12 high-speed solid dose count system
- Tablet Elevator for feeding tablet counters, keeping the hoppers on the Rx-12 full
- Metal detector purchased through BellatRx, which they integrated into the line for Provident
- Secure Star Capper that caps the bottles
- SL 50 neck-bander against tampering with a shrink tunnel
- An accumulation table
- and a BellatRx Wrap Labeler
Provident chose a complete line purchase, manufactured by one company, to ease troubleshooting, part replacement, and other machine concerns. The line was ordered early 2019 and arrived late Dec. 2019. Peterson travelled to BellatRx for a Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT). The line was then put into full production by early Feb. 2020, completely unaffected by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, seeing as the company was considered an essential business. Rather the company saw a spike in sales because of the product produced.
Some fine-tuning was required at implementation to fix issues in getting bottles to run smoothly through the Bell-Sort, as well as some electrical minor issues. Peterson explained that Provident was especially impressed with BellatRx’s service and communication provided with outstanding customer care, including the use of software with augmented reality capabilities. BellatRx sent technicians to install the line and troubleshoot, verifying all machinery was properly operational, and to provide team trainings for the Provident operators, such as working new recipes into the machinery.
Among the benefits of the BellatRx machinery, Peterson pointed out the toolless changeover for many of the machines, which allows for easier setup, teardown, and cleaning; as well as the benefits from a business standpoint of having two bottling lines running night and day, which has nearly doubled the company’s output of bottles. Peterson further says that the machine operators appreciate the toolless changeover and training they received. Provident is in the process of installing an MES system which will allow for further benefits through data recovery off the line as much of the BellatRx machinery is already equipped with PLCs.
