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Long time wine packaging pro's Dave Hammond (formerly of Encore! and others) and Neil Foster (M.A. Silva closures) have partnered up to form Vertical Glass and Packaging. Their goal is to provide superior logistics for packaging supply.

From the North Bay Business Journal:

"SANTA ROSA — North Coast vintners have a new option for purchasing bottles and packaging.

Vertical Glass & Packaging of Santa Rosa is a venture by Neil Foster, president and owner of cork distributor M.A. Silva Corks USA of Santa Rosa, and David Hammond, who has been a wine packaging marketer locally for several years and is president of Vertical.

“Today’s packaging suppliers are facing more and more challenges to meet the increasing demands of bottling operations,” Mr. Foster said.

One of the services the wine packaging startup is touting, in addition to supply parameters for high-speed lines and aesthetic quality, is just-in-time ordering from glass plants in China and North America.

“If effective delivery times change from wineries, we change accordingly,” Mr. Hammond said. “We’re manufacturing, shipping and delivering on a schedule exposed to the customer base.”

That includes a system for allowing customers to track the delivery schedule from the time of ordering until arrival at the bottling facility.

Some wineries have been adjusting their bottling schedules because of slower depletions in certain markets since economic conditions started worsening in 2008.

Wine packaging suppliers have told the Business Journal that changes in the size of orders and delivery schedule have challenged cash flow and inventory management.

Vertical Glass & Packaging has contract warehousing in Benicia for bottles and packaging materials such as boxes, partitions and recycled cardboard bottle shippers. Offices are in the M.A. Silva Corks USA facility in north Santa Rosa, but Vertical isn’t connected to that company, which distributes stoppers for M.A. Silva Corticas of Portugal."

Winebusiness.com adds some more detail:

"An Industry First: According to Hammond, his firm’s vertically integrated scheduling and delivery is an industry first. “We developed our order scheduling and logistics capabilities upon the evolving needs of wineries,” he said. “Like other industries, wine bottling has become a just-in-time operation. Inventoried glass and packaging consumes valuable warehouse space and employee attention. Our goal is to seamlessly interface our delivery with a winery’s bottling schedule, and provide error free shipping, competitive pricing and the strictest quality standards."