Coca-Cola Northmead factory celebrates 50th birthday
As Coca-Cola celebrates 50 years at its vast western Sydney factory, we lift a lid on the everyday operation at the complex producing one of the world’s most iconic brands. Watch the video.
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When the silos first filled at the Coca-Cola factory at Northmead on September 25, 1972, there were no uniforms in sight as workers donned the casual fashion of the day — flared pants or suits, and no hair nets to cover flowing locks.
It was 80 years after Atlanta chemist John Pemberton first concocted the drink with cocaine, which was then a legal substance, as a way to wean him off his opium habit, and called it French Wine Cola. It adopted the catchy name Coca-Cola when prohibition forced alcohol out of the mix. Cocaine was gone.
In Australia, Coca-Cola had been consumed since the early 1900s after imports started from the US but production began in Australia in 1938 in a small building at inner-city Waterloo with 10 staff and four trucks.
As manufacturing grew in Sydney’s west and the global brand exploded, the Coke factory was constructed in Northmead but it was not until five years later on May 17, 1979, that the official opening got underway with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
The first drink off the production line at Briens Rd — now a sprawling 40,000sq m complex — was not the fabled Coca-Cola but Tab, which was the low-sugar version of Diet Coke and Coke No Sugar, which weren’t on the market until 1982 and 2017 respectively.
Five decades on, a more health-conscious market means Coke No Sugar is the beverage the Northmead factory makes the most of and it accounts for half of its growth in NSW, supply chain vice president Orlando Rodriguez said.
“Coke No Sugar for us is going gangbusters,’’ he said.
The hub has two can lines and the first was debuted in 1972, making it the oldest operating canning line at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners in Australia.
Since its maiden year when 1000 cans were filled in a 12-hour shift, the output has soared exponentially and now more than a million are produced over the same period.
Today, upgrades to the can line allow it to fill 2000 cans a minute.
There are 20 beverages and 250 different products manufactured at Northmead, which became the only Coca-Cola factory in NSW, when other sites such as the Smithfield cannery ceased operating in 2009 after it relocated to Brisbane.
There are four factories in Australia and the western Sydney hub produces a third of the nation’s Cola and other tipples such as Sprite and Fanta.
“This is right in the heart of what we do and this area’s grown up around this factory,’’ Rodriguez said.
The most in-demand items, Coke Zero and Coca-Cola, are bottled every week but drinks such as Fanta are made on a three-week cycle.
Northmead is the second largest site in Australia, after Richlands in Brisbane and it is the 13th largest volume producer of Coca-Cola Europacific Partners.
And if you’re wondering if employees are privy to Cola’s secret formula, can the thought.
“No one in Australia knows the recipe,’’ Rodriguez said.
“It’s one of those tightly guarded secrets. Six people allegedly in the world know that recipe. It’s the secret sauce which no one gets to see.’’
To keep the recipe under wraps, ingredients are packaged separately before being mixed, keeping the ingredients and portions a mystery.
In 2008, the vast storage zone, known by staff as the high bay, expanded and houses walls of palettes — 50,000 — along with 34 monorails, 13 double-mast cranes reaching 27.5m and six automated truck loading docks for between 120 and 170 trucks to make 300 movements each day.
The high bay is 127m long, 28m high, 92m wide and 11,680sq m. Machines dominate the space, which for all its capacity has just a handful of workers who have survived automation domination manufacturing.
Automation is the obvious change site manager Gerard Weilche has witnessed in his 32 years with Coca-Cola, and remembers when more manual forklifts maneuvered around the work site, including at Smithfield.
Of the 383 employees at Northmead, 182 are on the production line but Coke is keen to spruik the loyalty among its workers, whose average span with the company is 17 years.
Production manager Charles Nassif, 40, is one of them.
After studying microbiology and immunology at the University of NSW following high school, he took up work experience at Northmead and has embraced the job that has given him the title “Charlie from the Coke factory’’.
“I came straight out of uni but it’s the fact that everyone knows I work at Coke,’’ he said.
“Most people that know me know I’ve worked at Coke my whole career, they know me as Charlie and the Coca-Cola factory, not the chocolate factory, and they know where to go to when they want some Coke in their fridges.’’
Nassif is well versed on the science behind the production process, demonstrating how plastic is melted from a test tube before it becomes bottled after a 150 degree blast in the oven.
Under the high bay, two Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of recycled water are stored.
The company will celebrate its golden jubilee with special products released next month.
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