How Guala Closures is recalibrating for an evolving spirits market

The machines in Guala Closures Gartcosh’s facility are constantly refined and fine-tuned, now they are being adapted to a changing Scottish whisky market.

Insider Media

For over a decade, distillers focused on premiumisation but now the market is calibrating towards a model where volume is more prominent.

Guala Closures makes over a billion closures a year here, a large percentage of these bound for the whisky industry.

Closures are the caps of bottlings which are manufactured and moulded to each customer’s specific needs, focused on style but increasingly security.

Guala Closures has added new capabilities, including aluminium capacity, to match this tilt towards mid-range products.

New aluminium lines are due to be commissioned by the end of 2026, alongside a sixth electromagnetic forming line commissioned this month, lifting the site's Electromagnetic forming (EMF) capacity by a further 20 per cent.

EMF sends a high-energy pulse through a coil generating a magnetic field that shapes metal at speed, without a physical die touching it.

At Gartcosh it shrinks the aluminium sleeve onto the plastic closure underneath.

This makes the finished cap effectively impossible to take apart and refill, a technique that isn't used in closure manufacturing anywhere else in the world.

“Guala Closures quickly turns investment into action, Peter said.

“A lot of the whisky companies are just taking a step back from premiumisation and going to more mid-range products. Intuitively, the market is going this way. That's the way we need to go."

The aluminium build-out is the clearest signal.

"Aluminium manufacturing is something that predominantly was not manufactured here at Gartcosh," he says.

"We've now got three aluminium punching lines, I've got another three coming.

“These investments are made as part of a clear, organic investment plan aimed at strengthening and unlocking the potential of our most strategic sites.”

The owner is an Italian investment group that took Guala Closures private off the Milan exchange in 2021 and now holds a group running 40 plants worldwide with more than 5,000 staff.

The plant consolidated two sites at Kirkintilloch and one at Bridge of Allan into a single facility at Gartcosh at a cost the company now puts at more than €60m.

Guala Closures describes it as the most significant investment the group has made anywhere in the world.

That would be a natural point to stop and let the concrete set.

Peter said: "Continuous improvement and investment are part of our DNA.

"We are constantly looking at opportunities to strengthen our manufacturing capabilities and remain at the forefront of technology and innovation."

What the site is really being built for is optionality.

More than 300 people work at Gartcosh, producing over a billion closures a year.

Guala Closures says between 90 and 95 per cent of them ultimately reach export markets, inside someone else's bottle.

Tariffs and softening US and China demand reach the plant second-hand, through the distillers it supplies and commodity pricing hits it directly.

Some polymer grades came close to doubling in price during the spring spike, when the Middle East conflict drove European resin costs to records.

Rather than negotiate, Guala Closures spent cash reserves buying raw material in bulk, taking the hit on budget to avoid taking it on supply.

"None of our customers care that you might have to pay more for the product," Peter said.

"They're going to care pretty quickly if you say I can't supply you."

The other hedge is geography, Guala Closures is the only closure manufacturer supplying the Scotch whisky industry from within Scotland, sitting close to the bottling halls it serves while rivals ship from continental Europe.

It is the same logic Guala Closures applied in Mexico this year, buying Vinventions' screwcap plant at Rosarito to sit closer to US customers.

"We are located close to our customers' bottling plants, which is ideal from a sustainability standpoint," Peter said.

"Our customers will be much more focused on local manufacturing than they were about saving a penny to buy something from China or somewhere else."

The ground Guala Closures was built on was part of the Gartcosh steelworks until 1986, when it closed with the loss of around 700 jobs.

Four decades on, the same acres carry a technology nobody else in the world uses.

How Guala Closures was created

Before Gartcosh, Guala Closures ran three Scottish sites, two at Kirkintilloch, one of them a satellite paint plant, and a factory at Bridge of Allan.

The company has been making closures in Scotland for more than 80 years.

Consolidating the three meant relocating what Peter says were 140 production lines, running around the clock and feeding bottling halls that cannot stop.

Each line took four weeks to move and the only way to do it without failing a customer was to build a stock buffer ahead of every shutdown, run the inventory down while the line was in transit, then bring it back up before the buffer ran out.

Much of it was done in parallel and the first moves began a month after Peter started as general manager.

"There were a few nervous moments as we got to that bottom curve," he says.

What went with the machinery was harder to replace.

Some of the legacy workforce had 30 or 40 years on site, and much of the engineering knowledge sat with individuals rather than in documentation.

Staff were driven between sites and given trials before committing.

Most, Peter says, were persuaded inside ten minutes of reaching the canteen.

Integrating local knowledge with process, he concedes, remains the harder part of the job.

Guala Closures: five things to know

1. Scale. The company says the plant produces over a billion closures a year, with between 90 and 95 per cent ultimately reaching export markets inside someone else's bottle.

2. The build. Three legacy Scottish sites, two at Kirkintilloch, one at Bridge of Allan, consolidated into a single facility Guala Closures describes as its most significant investment anywhere in the world.

3. What's next? A sixth electromagnetic forming line commissioned this month, adding 20 per cent to EMF capacity, with new aluminium lines due before the end of 2026.

4. Who it supplies. Guala is the only closure manufacturer serving the Scotch whisky industry from within Scotland.

5. The ask. Stability in energy pricing. Gartcosh has 2.4MW of rooftop solar but remains exposed to wider energy costs, directly and through its supply chain.