Dreher Adds A 12,000 Carton An Hour Elopak Aseptic Line Into A German Juice Market Down To 1,915 Million Litres

I would ask any juice board the same question. Do you own the filling line, or do you rent it? Dreher has answered it with an Elopak machine that runs up to 12,000 cartons an hour.

What Dreher has installed at Stockach

Dreher Group sits at Stockach on Lake Constance and has made fruit juice since 1924. The family firm sold juice bases, oat bases, concentrates and purees to other makers. Now it fills finished packs itself. The new line is an Elopak E-PS120AH and it runs up to 12,000 cartons an hour. Pack sizes run from 500 ml to 1,000 ml. It fills several Pure-Pak shapes from pre-printed blanks. Elopak supplied the machine and pulled the other suppliers together. Juice goes into the Pure-Pak Sense Aseptic carton. The site also runs the eSense version, which drops the aluminium layer for a polymer barrier. Dreher works two shifts and sold commercial output a week after start-up. The floor was laid out to take a second Elopak filler.

The German market that line fills into

Our Global Aseptic Packaging Market Report 2026 sizes what the machine is joining. German makers filled 6.6 billion litres aseptically in 2025, in 9.5 billion packs. The figure was 7,564 million litres in 2020. It has fallen 2.6% a year since then. The model takes it to 6,258 million litres by 2030. Cartons hold 60.3% of that volume and 53.1% of the packs. The average German aseptic pack holds 698 ml. That is among the largest in the study. Family cartons of H-Milch and juice carry most of it.

Juice is the category losing the litres

German juices and nectars came to 1,915 million litres in 2025, down 4.6% a year. Juice drinks hold another 1,170 million litres. Juice drinking has fallen from 31.5 litres a head in 2018 to 22.5 litres in 2025. That series is the fruit juice trade body's own. Two rising lines pull the other way. Ready-to-drink tea and coffee grows 5.0% a year and sports and energy drinks 11.6%. Together they added 340 million litres between 2020 and 2025. Juices and nectars lost 505 million over the same years.

Hot fill and preservatives are taking the shelf

German long-life drinks hold 4,100 million litres and stay flat to 2030. Aseptic filling is 2,758 million litres of that today. Its share of the shelf has slid from 79.7% in 2020 to 67.3%. The model puts it at 60.8% by 2030. Hot filling has gone the other way to 806 million litres. It grew 5.9% a year across the review period. Preservative filling reached 536 million litres and grew 13.7% a year. Family cartons of ambient drinks fall 4.1% a year to 783 million litres by 2030. So Dreher has bought into the part of the shelf that is shrinking fastest.

Why a juice group still buys its own filler

German ambient juice filling is a cold-aseptic PET business and the evidence is direct. riha WeserGold fills about 900 million litres a year and calls itself the leader in cold-aseptic PET. Eckes-Granini runs Krones dry-aseptic lines at Bad Fallingbostel. Valensina fills cold aseptic at Vechta. Gropper added Krones dry-aseptic capacity in 2018 and 2019. Co-packers fill more than half of German discounter juice volume. So a small number of sites set the pack and the technology for a large share of the shelf. Dreher sold juice bases into that system for years. Owning a filler moves the firm up the chain.

Oat drinks are the other reason to own a carton filler. German plant-based output rose from 190 million litres in 2020 to 290 million in 2025. The model takes it to 365 million by 2030. Dreher already sells oat bases, so filling them is a short step. The eSense carton matters here as well. It drops the aluminium layer, which helps where packaging rules reward simpler material.

What this means for the market

Germany is unattractive on volume and nobody should pretend otherwise. Aseptic litres fall 2.0% a year to 2030 on our model. Carton litres fall faster still. An entrant reading the national total would stay out. The money here sits somewhere else. Own-label juice and oat drinks need carton capacity that few German firms hold. More than half of discounter juice runs through co-packers. So filling capacity is the scarce asset rather than demand. The thing worth testing before any spend is the contract book. A 12,000 carton an hour line needs volume signed, and Germany has no spare growth to supply it.

For fillers and suppliers, the important question is now where carton capacity still earns a return in a falling market. Pack type and filling technology answer that market by market. Our Global Aseptic Packaging Market Report 2026 splits all 39 markets both ways. A free 40-page sample sits on the page.