For Prima Industries, an EIC Accelerator Champagne Cleaner Stalled

Champagne made by the traditional method ages for years in cellars, and the bottles come out marked by lime scale, iridescence and rust. The wine inside is untouched, but a luxury bottle has to look pristine, so the marks are polished off by hand. Prima Industries Srl, a maker of plastic bus accessories in Correggio near Reggio Emilia, said Moët & Chandon had asked it to build a machine that would do the job instead. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's Green Deal round of 19 May 2020, the European Commission selected the project, called PPB, for a grant. The grant agreement, worth €554,925 towards a €792,750 project, was signed on 7 October 2020, according to CORDIS.

The project was meant to run until 31 October 2022. CORDIS records that it was "terminated on 15 December 2021". The company's own periodic report says PPB "was stopped on Nov. 2021", because the pandemic left no large Champagne house available to test the machine and rising material costs made it too expensive for the small and medium wineries it was aimed at.

A Bus Parts Maker Again

Prima Industries is active, but not in bottles. Its website now redirects to Prima Automotive, which sells handles, door locking systems, air diffusers, interior lights, stop request buttons and luggage racks for buses, and describes itself as "a Prima industries company" at the same Correggio address and VAT number. The trade site Bus News lists Volvo Group, Iveco, MAN, Scania and Van Hool among its customers and carries company product announcements from April to July 2026, including a redesigned emergency hammer and a new lock mechanism for its P119 handle range. The company's own news page announced a wireless stop button system, Instastop, available to order from early April 2025.

The bottle business has gone. In 2020 the group website presented Prima Industries as a holding with two divisions, Automotive and Labelling, the second making "labelling and bottling machines for beverage and food industry". The Labelling site, primalabelling.it, was last archived in 2023 and its domain no longer resolves. In a company profile published by Bus News ahead of Busworld 2023, Prima said it planned "a full focus on automotive activities" and had been working towards that "since February 2023, when we spun off every activity different from our core business activities". Who took over the labelling machines, and whether any PPB work went with them, could not be verified.

The Technology: Polishing Full Bottles Without Chemicals

Bottle washers are a mature market, but the CORDIS report notes that they are built for empty bottles before filling and rely on chemicals and heavy friction. Prima's problem was the opposite: full, aged bottles of sparkling wine whose contents must not be warmed or contaminated. The report says the existing washing lines cannot remove all cellar deposits and that 15 to 20% of bottles still have to be cleaned and polished by hand.

The first design, set out in the 2019 Phase 1 project, was a three-stage line: nylon brushes impregnated with silicon-carbide resin to clean, bespoke cotton spindles to polish, and a scanner to check and sort the bottles. It was to sell for €55,000 and clean 70% of affected bottles. By the EIC Accelerator project, the plan had become a modular line with a dry cleaning module that uses no water, a wet module using a third of the water of manual cleaning, an artificial vision module and a recirculation module, handling up to 1,500 bottles an hour with "a minimum of 90% cleaning and polishing success rate" and a temperature rise of less than 0.2°C, according to the report. In November 2019 Prima described the line, then named PPB1500, as patented; no patent number was given, and no patent held by the company could be found.

What PPB Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

PPB was a two-step EU project. The SME Instrument Phase 1 grant of €50,000 paid for a feasibility study from August to November 2019; its report says in-lab tests settled on a polishing rate of up to 1,500 bottles an hour, added artificial vision to the design and produced a business plan. The Phase 2 grant came from the EIC Accelerator pilot's Green Deal topic, as CORDIS shows. The Commission's list for that round gives the funding type as "grant" and names three Italian winners: Prima, TECNO of Formigine and Tomapaint of Parma.

The goals were large for a €792,750 project. The CORDIS objective promised "11M€ accumulated profit in 5 years of exploitation and the creation of 14 new working positions", and savings of €2.1 million a year for a large producer of 500,000 bottles. According to the report, the project produced a first prototype of the polishing module for tests in an industrial setting, a laboratory prototype of the wet cleaning module with a bill of materials for an industrial version, and a design of the vision module with its software checked digitally. No test at a Champagne house, sale or launch has been announced.

1. Polishing modulePrototypeFirst prototype for industrial tests built, per the report.
2. Wet cleaning moduleLab onlyLaboratory prototype; industrial version only designed.
3. Artificial vision moduleDesign onlyDesigned and software checked digitally; no hardware reported.
4. Validation at a Champagne houseNot achievedNo partner was available during the pandemic, the report says.
5. Market launch, 14 jobs, €11M profitNot achievedNo sale announced; non-core activities spun off in 2023.
6. Two-year project to October 2022TerminatedEnded 15 December 2021, per CORDIS.

What the Company Said at the Time

In April 2021, five months into the project, Prima told readers of its labelling website that a commission of "institutional expert investors" had validated its projections. The English version of the post said the EC had awarded over €500,000 and "the possibility of negotiating equities for a value of almost € 1.5 million"; the Italian version instead spoke of negotiating a loan of up to almost €1.5 million with the European Investment Bank. Both posts said the project was one of three Italian winners in the environmental session, which matches the Commission list, and the English one added that "important Champagne producers" had offered to host tests. The Commission list shows a grant only, and Prima Industries does not appear among the 319 companies on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked on 15 October 2026. No equity or loan linked to PPB could be found.

The Money

Prima Industries' revenue fell from €7.53 million in 2019 to €5.52 million in 2020, the year of the award, when it lost €573,212, according to filed accounts compiled by Topaziende. Revenue recovered to €6.55 million in 2022 and dropped to €5.44 million in 2024, with small profits in 2021, 2023 and 2024 and a loss of €85,790 in 2022. Atoka, which says its latest figures refer to 2025, lists revenue of €5.6 million, a stable trend, 30 employees and share capital of €100,000. Topaziende counts 31 staff. Neither source shows staff numbers for the years before the award, so whether the project created any jobs cannot be checked. How much of the €554,925 grant was paid out before termination is not public.

The sources also disagree on the company's age. Bus News says Prima Industries was founded in 1992 by the Alberti brothers, whose father co-founded SPAL in Correggio, while Atoka gives the company's age as 17 years. Which legal entity the 1992 date refers to could not be verified.

Why Europe Should Care

PPB was funded as a Green Deal project, and its central claim was water: dry cleaning with no water and wet cleaning with a third of the water used today, with a CO2 cut the report put at about 3,200 tonnes a year. That fits current EU policy. The Commission's Water Resilience Strategy of June 2025 aims to improve water efficiency by at least 10% by 2030 and puts efficiency before new supply, as summarised by the International Association of Water Supply Companies in the Danube River Catchment Area and the Planetary Security Initiative. The project also targeted heavy manual work in wine cellars that the company's report called "usually underpaid".

The Verdict

Prima Industries has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.