WorldStar Winner: Think Small, Dream Big -Small Sized Barrier PET

WINNERS 2025

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Think Small, Dream Big -Small Sized Barrier PET

Company:

The Coca-Cola Company

The Coca-Cola Company

Country: USA

Category: Non-Alcoholic Beverages

Big things can come in small packages! This is exactly what Coca-Cola had in mind when it developed new lightweight 12 oz. Barrier PET bottle for the future consumption category. Anchored by strong aspirations to significantly reduce the plastic weight while keeping freshness, retain bottle design equity, and easy to integrate into our bottlers, the packaging team set out to make this dream a reality.

Smaller bottles are more difficult to keep their carbonation due to the volume-to-surface-area ratio. When you consider removing plastic weight and how a future consumption package travels through the supply chain to the consumer, this puts significant design limitation on traditional PET packaging.

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As the engineering team set out to develop the new bottle structure, they faced significant challenges when the design goals went head-to-head. The new structure needed to keep the iconic design features of each brand (Coke, Sprite, and Fanta), remain compatible with existing filling equipment lines, while reducing the plastic weight without affecting the beverage flavor.

By combining new innovative design techniques and barrier coating technology, the team solved this dilemma. By introducing a thin glass-like barrier layer on the inside of the bottle, the plastic was reduced significantly and kept barrier properties like traditional glass packaging. Simply put, we doubled its shelf life at one-third its starting weight.

This was not an easy task and as you can imagine, but through strong partnerships and innovation in design and manufacturing processes, we were able to deliver the bottle as promised.

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