Beer bottling stops at Black Country plant amid national carbon dioxide shortage
A beer bottling plant has been forced to stop production after being hit by the national shortage of carbon dioxide which it uses on its line.
Holden's Bottling Company in George Street, Woodsetton, faces at least a fortnight out of action after supplies of the gas ran out on Friday.
Operations director Mark Hammond said they had come to a standstill on Friday and had been unable to re-start production yesterday.
The family-run business bottles for more than 80 customers, including breweries all over the country as well as sister company Holden's Brewery for which it cannot currently bottles any of its range of real ales.
Mr Hammond said that CO2 supplies had started to run out last week and it had been unable to source any replacement supply.
Only one production plant was online in the UK and most plants in northern Europe were also down.
He said their usual supplier had told them it would not be until July 2 that other CO2 plants would be coming back online.
"We use six to seven tons a week and without any CO2 we can't bottle," he explained.
The company first knew of a problem on June 15 when it had a letter from the suplier saying that supplies might be a bit tight from June 18 and they were free to source the gas from somewhere else.
"I think it will be optimistic to think we would be back up and running in two weeks time. We need to know what the suppliers are doing because if we are still in this position in four weeks we will have to make provision for lay offs," said Mr Hammond.
He said the 25-strong workforce was carrying out cleaning and maintenance work while production was stopped.
"What frustrates me is that my family has spent 75 years building this business up and in all that time we have never has a period of closure due to incompetence of other people before," added Mr Hammond.
He said that other companies in the bottling industry were also suffering from the C02 shortage.
"I understand that Aston Manor Cider in Birmingham has had to reduce production along with breweries in other parts of the country," said Mr Hammond.
Fizzy drinks and meat producers have warned of possible shortages caused by the lack of CO2.
It follows a longer than usual break in production of ammonia, one of the key sources of food grade CO2 in Europe,.
CO2 is used to carbonate drinks and preserve some packed fresh foods.
The shortage had been described as the worst supply situation to hit the European carbon dioxide business in decades
