Premium juice bottling re-imagined

Going from glass packaging to plastic may offer some logistic and consumer convenience benefits, but it also can be a daunting move for brands that rely on glass for a premium image. This is the challenge that Bossa Nova Superfruits Co. LLC, Los Angeles, CA, faced two years ago, and it has helped kick start a string of packaging and operations updates that continues to this day.

The problem was, the Bossa Nova bottle with its distinctive, inverted exclamation-mark shape was difficult to convert and fill. The company’s copacker at that time was set up to fill glass Bossa Nova bottles with their metal caps, but it wasn’t prepared to fill the same shape in PET.

Bossa Nova bottles

Moved bottling in house

Today, the beverages are bottled in a Sunny Delight Beverages Co.-owned and operated facility in Dayton, NJ. The high-acid, aseptic line, dominated by equipment from Krones USA, was specifically designed to fill this type of product—a fact that Dan Sileo, vp of manufacturing at Sunny Delight Beverages Co. (SDBC) stresses.

 “It’s a newly designed line for high-acid aseptic PET bottling,” he says. “It was not converted from anything else.” The line was originally installed about two-and-half years ago for a SDBC product that the company is still developing a market for. Since then, Sileo explains, it has operated with a good deal of extra capacity despite the vast amount of products filled by SDBC for its internal beverage lines and its contract-packaging customers.

The NJ bottling facility was a natural fit for Bossa Nova. In addition to having the technology to aseptically fill its curvy bottles, the facility is located near the Amcor Rigid Plastics plant in nearby Allentown, PA, where the new PET bottles are converted, giving Bossa Nova and SDBC a sustainability win for their bottling application before the containers are even loaded onto the packaging line.

Focused on quality

PET bottles, which are blown but not decorated, arrive at the SDBC bottling facility on pallets, where a Busse/SJI Corp.W5002 depalletizer sweeps layers of bottles onto a conveyor system that feeds the packages into a Lanfranchi Srl unscrambler, which orients the containers into single file and feeds them to an airveyor, which conveys bottles by the neck.
 

Bottles suspended in neck-handled aiirveyor

Bottles zip down to the Krones Volumetric VODM-PET Filler, which features 80 filling valves and 24 capping heads. Inside the filler, bottles are injected with peracetic acid and a steam carrier for sterilization, which enables the sterilant to reach all areas of the curvy bottles with their shapely shoulders. After sterilization, bottles are rinsed and inverted.

Paul Sabelnik, business leader for the aseptic line at Sunny Delight Beverages Co.'s South Brunswick, NJ plant, notes that bottle rinsing sounds like it would be a simple operation without much room for improvement--but it’s not.

Bottles exiting the Rinser block

SDBC's Krones Variojet system uses both air and water to realize sustainability benefits. The dual-nozzle system enables SDBC to get a more effective rinse with significantly less water use.

PET bottles are picked up for rinsing from the air conveyor by a spacing starwheel for transfer to a clamp that holds the bottles by the neck. Bottles are inverted and swung 180-deg upwards to begin the rinsing process. The spraying nozzles are positioned directly underneath the neck finish.

Water is first sprayed into the bottle to rinse it. Then the system uses air to blow out all the water droplets. Additionally, water is used with air to help reach some of the more difficult parts of the bottle to rinse. Rinsed, dried bottles are returned to an upright position before being transferred to the discharge starwheel.

The filler then dispenses the juice through laminar-flow fill nozzles, which Sileo explains, offer the additional benefit of dispensing the juice without having contact between the filling nozzles and the bottles.

Bottles inside Filler Bloc being filled

“All throughout the whole filler block, the bottles are still neck handled,” he explains. “It’s a very clean filling operation. And we get a very consistent volumetric fill with no foaming and no overflow.”

Meanwhile, an external system supplied by Diversey Inc. disinfects the caps, which are first submerged with their open top facing up. The caps then are blown dry with sterile air before being sorted and conveyed to the monoblock filler for application. Immediately after capping, each bottle is coded by with the data indicating the filler nozzle and the capper head used for that specific bottle. 

The bottles are then quality checked using a Krones Checkmat 731, which offers vision inspection for verifying fill level in addition to checking for high and cocked caps.

Sileo explains: “Basically, there’s a picture taken of every bottle from three different angles. Those pictures are compared against the standard to check for correct fill level, correct cap placement, etc. If the cap is a little bit high or if it’s a little bit crooked, the system would see that and kick that bottle out. So, as we’re running at 600 bottles/min, these cameras are just flashing away, taking pictures of every single bottle with computer comparison of every single bottle to a standard. Furthermore, that unit is tied to the capper itself. So as the caps are being applied, if the system  senses anything’s wrong, if it senses that a cap jumps its thread—so to speak—the jaws flip on the capper itself and it’ll reject that bottle.”

Bottles exiting the Krones Accutower

Bottles that pass the quality check are transferred to a Krones Accutower, which offers dynamic machine buffering of bottles. The additional 160 sec of accumulation enables a SDBC packaging engineer to troubleshoot any small issues that may happen downstream on the line without having to stop the line.

Bottles then move to p-s labeler, which was refurbished by MTS. Each bottle is held in place at its top and bottom, then rotated for placement of a front and back p-s PP label.

The p-s labeling is a very recent improvement from the previous bottle decoration method, which was silk-screening and can be seen in the photos that accompany this article. “Through our testing, we determined that the ink was quite porous and could be a good harbor for bacteria and yeast to hide in, making it difficult to sterilize a bottle on the outside,” Sileo explains.

Removing the silk-screen decoration, he adds, eliminates a potential microbiological contamination point, while helping to reduce costs and improve the graphics. “We’re actually able to improve the bottle graphics," he notes. "Silk-screening was so expensive that they [upper management] limited the colors. We’re able to actually get a lot more colors back [with p-s labeling]."  Chuck Shuford, principal engineer of packaging development for SDBC, also adds that p-s labeling, supplied by Walle Corp., has also reduced material cost and provided more flexibility to change the bottle’s graphics.

Labeled bottles have a highly decorative shrink band applied to their necks by a Krones Garantomatic. The shrink-material is taken off the reel, carried through the conveyor rollers to the film supply unit and then to the labeling station. The sleeve of film, lying flat, is opened as it is pulled over a mandrel. Horizontal perforation can be applied here as well. The now-open sleeve is pushed onto the cap of the container held exactly in place in a transfer starwheel and then cut to the required length by a rotating blade. A shrink sleeve band placed in this way is positioned exactly by a synchronized belt. The Garantomatic came with a hot-air tunnel standard, but SDBC found that wasn’t the best solution for this application.

“We bypass that and send the bottles into the steam tunnel in order to get the better shrink,” Sabelnik explains. “We didn’t want to have the forced-air heater shrink the band unevenly and end up with some of the perforation holes in the band bigger than others. It’s nice when the perforation is there, but you don’t necessarily see it unless you get close.”

From the Krones Shrinkmat steam tunnel, the bottles are laser marked with an expiration date or best-by date as well as a Connecticut license number. “This is a very specific type of code or license,” Sileo explains. “So we have to apply to the state of Connecticut each year; we have five facilities in North America each with their own unique code.”

Bottle lanes feeding into Tray Packer

The bottles then move to the Krones Variopac Pro tray packer. “A tray blank fed from under neath the machine is folded around the bottles to create a finished tray,” Sabelnik explains. “Then the tray itself is folded around the bottles, gets coded with the expiration date and lot number, and a clear overwrap is placed and shrunk around the tray.”

Tray being formed around a set of bottles

At time of publication, Bossa Nova primarily is unitized in counts of 12 for the 10-oz bottles. But SDBC is considering other options. “We have capability to do many different configurations,” Sabelnik explains. “Customers have told us that they would prefer a smaller case. So, as we moved toward organic-certified product, we’ll be moving to an eight-count case.” 

Finished cases prior to palletizing

The finished trays travel down conveyors to the FKI Logistex (now Intelligrated Inc.) A-910 palletizer, which builds product pallets. A fully-automatic Robopac Sistemi Helix HS 30 secures the pallets with PE stretch film. The system uses a rotating arm to stretch wrap around a static pallet, helping to eliminate any risk of product falling from the load during the wrapping process regardless of the arm rotation speed. It can wrap pallets as large as 1,200 x 1,200 mm with a standard pallet height of 2,000 mm.

Moving forward

In addition to the new structure, decoration and bottling line, Bossa Nova will be making a few more changes by the end of the year. “We just achieved organic certification from QAI (Quality Assurance Intl. Organic Certification),” Sileo says. SDBC expects to be producing and packaging organic-certified products within the next few weeks.

The packaging operations team also is working on adding a Protag neck hanger applicator from RayPress Corp. Bossa Nova was already putting neck tags on bottles manually, but Sileo says automating the task will increase efficiency and heighten productivity.

Currently, he says, neck tag hanging is done by temporary staff being brought into the facility as needed or employees going out to the retailers and putting the tags on product on shelves and in chillers. In addition to being inefficient, manual application of tags can provide the additional problem of having people accidentally knocking down bottles. This can especially be troublesome in the high-speed bottling and packing environment.

Integrated tag system

The Protag system has been developed for high-speed production lines and is supplied as an integrated tag and applicator package. The Protag applicator is a free-standing unit with twin-roll feeding of the tags. The machine’s automatic changeover feature helps ensure continuous operation. The neck tag utilizes a single-component construction with multicolor print options in up to 14 colors. The packaging operations team is currently testing both the tag performance as well as making adjustments to the packaging line.

Sabelnik explains: “Because it’s a little different tag than we’ve used in the past, we are testing the materials to make sure that they maintain their appearance and that they don’t wrinkle or bleed color. Obviously, the bottles are in the chiller a lot of times, so you can get condensation.”

At time of publication, the project was progressing well and the system is expected to be fully online by December 2010. SDBC plans to use the system to hang neck tags on approximately 50 percent of all Bossa Nova products bottled at the NJ plant.


Amcor Rigid Plastics, 734/428-9741. www.amcor.com
Busse/SJI Corp., an Arrowhead Systems Inc. Co., 920/326-3131. www.arrowheadsystems.com
Diversey Inc., 262/631-4001.www.johnsondiversey.com
Intelligrated Inc., 314/993-4700. www.intelligrated.com
Krones USA, 414/409-4000. www.krones.com
Lanfranchi Srl , +39 0521 541011.www.lanfranchigroup.com
MTS, 800/806-4797. www.multi-techsystems.com

Quality Assurance Intl Organic Certification, 858/792-3531. www.qai-inc.com
RayPress Corp., 800/423 3731. www.raypress.com
Robopac Sistemi, +39 0541 673 411. www.robopacsistemi.com
Walle Corp., 800/942-6761. www.walle.com

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