Last month, our factory's technical team just completed a "urgent" project - helping a Southeast Asian sauce company to transform its production line. The chili sauce and curry bags they produced were complained about "mold spots found when opening the bags" in local supermarkets, which scared the purchasing manager to fly to us with samples overnight. After opening the problematic packaging bags brought by the customer, my colleague Lao Li and I saw the crux at a glance: the open filling station of the traditional packaging machine is simply a breeding ground for microorganisms!
Customer pain point: There is always 1% of "mold bombs" in each batch of goods
"The workshop is disinfected with alcohol three times a day, and workers are not even allowed to wear rings, but there are still problems in the random inspection!" The customer's production director sighed while pointing to the test report. Our field investigation found that when filling, the sauce was exposed to the air for up to 20 seconds in their old packaging machine, not to mention the air flow disturbance caused by the movement of people during shift changes. In this environment, even the strictest disinfection cannot stop microorganisms from "slipping through the cracks".
Key to breaking the deadlock: "locking" microorganisms out of the workshop
The solution we provided was clear - rebuilding the production line with a fully enclosed aseptic packaging system. The core of this equipment lies in "triple protection":
The packaging environment purification module forms a positive pressure clean air layer in the filling area, which is equivalent to wearing a "transparent mask" for the packaging station
The filling head and the film former are fully closed and linked, and the sauce goes directly from the sterilization pipeline to the seal without contacting the outside air
Ultraviolet dynamic sterilization lamps are installed at key stations, and even the "dead corners" in the gaps of the equipment are not spared
On the day of commissioning, the customer technician Xiao Chen stared at the monitoring screen and exclaimed: "It turns out that the sauce has never seen what the workshop ceiling looks like from the sterilization kettle to the bag sealing!"
Practical test: continuous production in the rainy season without "turnover"
What impressed customers most was the stability of the equipment. It happened to be the rainy season in Southeast Asia, and the humidity in the workshop soared to 85%. We forced the new production line to run for 72 hours. The 1,000th bag of finished product was opened for colony detection, and the value was directly two orders of magnitude lower than the industry standard. The boss of the customer was shaking with his hands holding the test sheet: "If I had known that your aseptic packaging system was so useful, I should have thrown the old equipment into the sea three years ago!"
Detail control victory: even the screw seams are counted into the cleanliness
Many people think that the fully enclosed design is just adding a transparent cover, but the real technical content is hidden in invisible places. For example, our filling valve adopts a quick-release structure to avoid the sanitary dead corners of the traditional flange connection; the conveyor belt is replaced with antibacterial coated stainless steel, and even the screws are designed to be flat-headed to prevent fouling. Lao Li often says: "Microorganisms are smaller than sesame seeds, we have to use microscope-level seriousness!"
Future upgrade: Let the clean workshop "move" into the packaging machine
At present, we are adding an intelligent monitoring module to this aseptic packaging system. By displaying the temperature, humidity and particle concentration of the filling area in real time, customers can grasp the "sterility index" like looking at the dashboard of a car. Recently, a dairy customer has put forward a new demand: "Can an ozone generator be integrated into the equipment?" You see, a good solution is like a snowball, and the trust of customers will make the technology more and more solid.
