Wakefield gets £13m investment from Coca-Cola

Coinciding with its 20th anniversary of manufacturing in our region, Coca-Cola Enterprises Ltd has announced a major investment in a new can line at their plant at Wakefield, the largest soft-drinks factory in Europe. The new line will increase production by an additional 2,000 cans every minute, from over 66 cans/second to over 100 cans/second, making the site one of the fastest soft-drinks factories in the world.

What’s Coca-Cola’s history in our region?

The site at Wakefield opened in 1989 as part of an original investment of £90m. Over the past 20 years, a further investment of £150m has meant that the factory now produces over 1,000,000 cans of product every day.

How green is this plan?

This latest investment will allow the factory to produce its own pre-forms, which are then blown into polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles—helping to cut carbon emissions by reducing delivery miles by 135,000 every year. However, the Wakefield site has spent the past 20 years proving itself as a leader in sustainable development. Among other initiatives, it has:

  • Introduced sustainable packaging across its product range
  • Worked with Rexam to have cans supplied from a factory right next door (thus reducing road miles)
  • Sent zero waste to landfill since 2008.
  • Introduced energy monitoring and targetting, allowing the site to identify potential energy-saving opportunities
  • Achieved one of the best water-usage ratios in the Coca-Cola system worldwide
  • Opened an education centre which, since 2002, has been visited by over 35,000 students engaging in work-related learning and enterprise initiatives.

What is the significance of this plant?

  • Coca-Cola is one of Wakefield’s largest employers, providing over 500 jobs for the local community.
  • The equivalent size of 25 football pitches, and housing 9 production lines, this is the largest Coca-Cola site in Europe—producing over 100 million cases of soft drinks every year.
  • It is also Coca-Cola’s most energy-efficient UK plant.