By David MacDonald T hey’ll create a fully-automated packaging line that fits in your facility. They’ll meet your CIP (Clean-in- Place) and SIP (Sanitize-in- Place) needs. They have equip- ment experience with box erectors, palletizers, depalletiz- ers, drop packers, fillers, crown conveyors, fill level inspec- tion systems, marking systems, automated valve controls – and more. They have controls experience with PLCs (Pro- grammable Logic Contollers), HMIs (Human-Machine Inter- faces), SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), remote system control, process PID (Proportional-Integral- Derivative) loops, databases, and alarming systems. “We can help with the systems and anything that helps run the systems that help make beverages,” Josh said. “Brian and I are both automation engineers and we both came at it from different angles; he’s more of a mechanical engineer and I do more of the programming and electrical work.” Between the two owners of Twin Monkeys Beverage Canning Systems and their on-site engineering team there is over 60 years of combined experience designing custom applications and integrating various pieces of equipment from a wide variety of vendors. “Brian and I met 15 or 20 years ago on a job doing the same kind of project work,” Josh explained. “We have deep experience with automa- tion engineering. Meanwhile, I had been home brewing since it was legal for me to do it; I worked at Anheuser Busch for a bit and then opened my own brewery in 2013. I was a professional brewer for about two-and- a-half years and created some nice recipes before I sold it to my business partner so that I could concentrate on this startup Brian and I had put together: Twin Monkeys.”
“It came about because we identified a particular need in the market for a kind of quality we knew exactly how to deliver with canning lines,” he continued. “What we were seeing out there we thought were either over-priced or of poor quality so we thought we could deliver a pretty good package. We had created a canning line and a keg washer for my brewery back in 2013/2014 and that’s when we knew we had this thing nailed. We said, “Let’s go!” and we opened the business up and started to sell them to everyone.” Brian explained that the sales side of Twin Monkeys starts with a specification worksheet that their customers order from like you would with a brand new car. “You can think of it like someone saying, ’I want the chrome wheels, but I don’t want the CD six-pack in the back.’ We have lots of options. That process allows us to talk to the customer about their exact needs, which often allows us to identify some unique needs that we will then take a look at before we finalize the release of the project. Being automation engineers we latch onto these unique needs and we get to work figuring out what it is we have to do to for each customer. What we hear more than anything about our competitive advantage is that we don’t sit still. Most of our competitors – or at least some of them – won’t redesign or customize their product with any kind of regularity and we do – all the time.” “It’s basically an evolutionary process that we practice here and that’s just not true of everybody in this industry.” Part of not sitting still is reaching out. Josh’s and Brian’s respective and extensive backgrounds in equipment and controls integration have made them a lot of friends. “Our resumes really enable us to pull in others – what we call “solutions partners” – into the full system,” Josh said. “We design canning lines and what that means is that the portion we do fills the can, puts the lid on the can, and it seals the can – and then cleans up after itself. But there are other things that are needed in a canning line to make it fully functioning from start to finish. Some people need depal- letizing, which takes the cans off of a pallet and into our filling line; some people need specialized rinsing systems; and others need accumulation systems or labeling systems. Sometimes these are things we don’t do in-house because there are others who we’ve partnered with who do that quite well. It’s nice for us because we can approach a customer, or vice versa, and they know that one of their options is to order the entire kit and caboodle from us. They don’t have to just buy one component from us or a portion of what they need; they can get it all from us. They can also just go with what we design in-house, as well.”
Canning lines also do a lot for the curb appeal of any brewery, Brian explained. Many Twin Monkey customers
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FEBRUARY 2018 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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