Hygienic bottling using hot fill technology

With consumer resistance to sugary soft drinks growing, many people are turning to juices and sports drinks as a healthy alternative. For bottlers, however, this means satisfying the special technical demands made of the process and filling technology for such products. In South Africa, Coca-Cola Canners has opted for a bespoke high-performance hot filling line from KHS.

With its four canning and two PET lines, the production site in Wadeville just outside Johannesburg is one of the largest of its kind in the world. 320 employees working round the clock make sure that around 350 million litres of near-water beverage Glacéau, sports beverage Powerade and the Coca-Cola, Sprite and Fanta brands leave the factory every year.

Coca-Cola now bottles iced tea, sports drinks and juices with and without fruit chunks on the new line. The new pulpy beverages could not be bottled on the two existing lines for PET bottles. “The technology required for this is more sophisticated,” said Steve Nagiah, plant manager at Coca-Cola Canners.

Wanting to use hot fill technology for hygienic reasons and anticipating an output of up to 48,000 bottles/h, and following a carefully considered consultation process, Coca-Cola Canners decided to go for a system manufactured by its long-standing partner KHS.

“For this demanding project we developed a system which is precisely tailored to meet Coca-Cola’s specifications,” declared Philipp Casparby, project manager for KHS Manufacturing (South Africa), KHS’s South African subsidiary. Like other KHS block systems, the new line covers all stages in production from stretch blow moulding through filling to labelling, packaging and pelletising.

The key is in the detail, however; the line also processes fruit juices with a percentage of fruit pieces. These fruit chunks must not be damaged during filling; at the same time the low filling dosage tolerances must be adhered to. The company designed a line with two precision volumetric fillers. On this the fruit pieces are first bottled with a little juice before the second filler tops up the bottles with the rest of the juice.

The entire filling process makes use of hot fill technology where the content is heated to over 100°C and then filled at a temperature of about 83°C. This makes sure that microorganisms are safely eliminated. With the new line Coca-Cola Canners is able to fill up to 48,000 bottles/h holding between 0.3 and 1.5 litres.

Image: Coca-Cola Canners in South Africa bottles a range of soft drinks in PET. KHS has developed and installed a complete new line for the site that is able to fill up to 48,000 bottles/h.