Tecámac, Mexico — A new Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc. bottling plant in Mexico is making PET bottles, and will injection mold preforms in the future.
President Enrique Peña Nieto officially opened a $53.2 million bottling plant, run by Dr Pepper Snapple's Grupo Peñafiel, on April 10.
The facility, the company's fourth, has been in operation since November.
PET preforms for the 200 million bottles a year that Peñafiel plans to produce at the facility currently are shipped from a company plant in Tehuacán, Fernando Cortés Gómez, a Peñafiel vice president, said in an interview at the event.
However, “in the future we will inject preforms in Tecámac,” Cortés said, without giving a time frame. Krones AG supplied the plastics processing equipment at the new plant. Cortés is Peñafiel's supply chain head.
The facility, which was not open to guests, has two production lines, which blow, label, fill and cap bottles. It stands on a 25 acre plot of land.
Dr Pepper Snapple's head office is in Plano, Texas. The company was founded in 2008 by Cadbury Scweppes plc, which had announced a year earlier plans to split its business into two — one concentrating on chocolates and confectionery and the other on its U.S. drinks business. DPSG is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Peñafiel was founded by the Peñafiel family as a mineral water brand in Tehuacán in 1948. Cadbury Scweppes acquired Peñafiel in 1992.
Peñafiel employs 3,800 and has four bottling plants in Mexico, including the new one. Its brands include Peñafiel mineral water, Squirt, DrPepper, Crush, Snapple, CanadaDry and Schweppes.