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Start-up offers traceability to spirits producers
Cloud-based spirit management system Vapour is transforming the way distilleries oversee their production and maturation processes.
Via comprehensive tracking of product journeys, Vapour provides an ‘innovative’ digital-first solution to augment traditional methods used in spirit production and maturation, offering traceability and transparency from crop to cask.
Founded by Stephen Hamilton in the northeast of Scotland, Vapour has been developed alongside industry experts and has enabled producers including Brewdog Distilling and Lochlea Distillery to track their products’ entire lifecycle with a mobile device, from raw material intake to cask maturation.
Hamilton explained: “We have developed Vapour in collaboration with leading industry experts, ensuring the platform addresses the specific operational challenges of running a distillery or maturing and bottling spirit. A key aspect of our philosophy is that we don’t ask you to do anything different than you do today – it’s as simple as recording your existing activities in Vapour.
“We’re proud to say that in just a few short years since launching, we now have customers as far afield as Australia using Vapour, and our customer base across Europe has expanded significantly too. The nature of the product means it’s extremely quick to set up for customers anywhere in the world and can be done remotely from our base in Scotland.”
By capturing data at every stage of the production and maturation processes, Vapour creates a comprehensive record of provenance, allowing spirits producers to monitor quality, track changes, and gain valuable insights into their spirits’ unique journey.
John Campbell, former production director at Lochlea Distillery, said: “Having previous experience of the traditional technology used in large volume spirit producers, I was immediately impressed with the Vapour platform from day one with how easy it has been to use and embed into our processes in the distillery.
“The fact that Vapour is a digital platform means that wherever I am in the world, I can have an instant overview of what’s happening at the distillery across production, maturation, and soon our bottling processes. Our inventory management and traceability have never been as good as they are now. The depth of utility and flexibility offered by Vapour is ideal for us and I’m sure many other spirits businesses.”
Hamilton added: “It is not just a digital record, we are digitising operations within distilleries and in turn giving them scalable, efficient and detailed support at every stage of production.
“It is fantastic to have clients like Brewdog Distilling, Lochlea Distillery and Scotch Whisky Investments on board, who we’ve worked with to enhance and craft the platform to meet the needs of our clients. We have also developed important industry partnerships such as Clyde Associated Engineers, a major supplier for fluid handling businesses like our distillery and maturation customers, to automate and digitise data capture on the distillery or warehouse floor.
“As is the nature of the product, we can easily adapt and add new functionality to Vapour based on feedback from our customers. We are in the relatively early stages of bringing Vapour to the world, but we feel hugely optimistic about the future.”
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