subject: Bottling Equipment | Discovery How It's Made [print this page] Have you ever seen the show on the Discovery Channel called How Its Made? Well if you have you may have notice the elaborate process starting with the raw materials and ending with a finished product. Throughout the number of episodes of How Its Made they show the different machines that are involved in the different stages of the completion of the product. Many of the products had to do with food or beverages, a classic interest in todays society.
Many of us like to drink soda, others prefer water, but they both involve the same type of equipment used to transfer the gallons upon gallons of liquid that are mixed in large tanks to the individual bottles or containers that end up in your pantries or refrigerators. Now imagine doing all of this by hand, such as a lemonade stand that we took part in as children. Say you and your friend came up with the best tasting lemonade in the world but you only had the ability to sell it to those who were passing by. Mass production machines have made manual labor obsolete.
When you walk into a grocery store and you pass through the condiments aisle you see a number of containers that are usually the same in many other grocery stores around the world. How is this possible you ask? Well there are machines that are capable of bottling all sorts of edible or inedible things that allow us to mass produce them. I will give you a brief walk through of the tedious tasks involved with bottling equipment (imagine the narrators voice from How Its Made).
1.Plastic or glass bottles ranging in size from small vials to large jugs start passing through these machine.
2.Next, depending on the company the container may be labeled before the filling process or after.
3.The bottles or containers follow one by one normally in a single file line through a machine called a rotary filler machine where they are basically held in place as they spin around the filling process.
4.The liquid is dumped into the funnel(s) of the machine where it is then dispensed into the containers designated for the product. Depending on the product being bottled it can range from 100 to 400 bottles filled per minute.
5.These containers then exit the bottling equipment machine into the capping machine where the container or bottles are sealed. It then follows down the rest of the production line where these containers are bundled together so they can be shipped in large quantities.
So next time youre drinking apple juice or about to pour a bear of honey into your tea, remember the process it took before it got into your hands. Thanks to the improvements in modern technology mass production has become more efficient in both cost and time.
