Ireland-based Bevcraft has further expanded its mobile canning business through a merger with leading Norwegian packaging specialist Heidrun Tapperi AS.
Bevcraft is now Europe’s largest craft can supplier, the company said, with mobile canning fleets, can decoration and can distribution hubs across seven locations in Norway, Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands. The business also exports cans to more than a dozen other countries.
The value of the transaction was not disclosed. Bevcraft already works with clients across the Scandinavian market, including Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland. The merger will better position the group to service these clients and continue to improve its offering across the region, said the company.
Heidrun was founded in Sandefjord, Norway by Eirik Solvåg, Ørjan Solvåg and Ole Solvåg in 2016, the same year in which the Bevcraft Group was founded in Mullingar, Ireland by Ciarán Gorman and Darren Fenton.
Eirik and Ørjan will both join the board of directors of the Bevcraft Group, which employs more than 40 staff in its production facilities in Sandefjord; Mullingar; Breda, in the Netherlands; and St Helens, Peterborough, Basingstoke, Leeds and Bradford, in the UK.
“We have long considered Heidrun one of the most technically adept and innovative operators as they have had to develop solutions particularly suitable for the Norwegian market which has a much more challenging geography, winter climate and labour market than our existing core markets,” said Bevcraft’s chief operating officer Darren Fenton.
“Unquestionably they will enhance the technical resources of the overall group and add to the overall knowledge base of the business.”
Bevcraft’s chief financial officer Ciarán Gorman added that the transaction has scaled the business footprint to a point where more than a quarter of all the breweries in Europe are less than a three-hour drive from a Bevcraft base.
The transaction follows last year’s acquisition of UK-based mobile canning business Them That Can.
In 2021 the group commissioned Europe’s first Tonejet Cyclone direct-to-can digital printer.
