Flavordose offers a game-changing solution for flavoured water production, ensuring precision, hygiene, and efficiency while maintaining the purity of mineral water.
Maintaining hydration is essential for health. But what should we drink? If the focus is on health, we should reach for water, yet many seek beverages with added flavour for enhanced enjoyment. Flavoured mineral water has emerged as a popular choice, offering the benefits of hydration with a subtle taste. However, incorporating flavours into mineral water presents significant challenges for production systems, particularly in ensuring the purity and consistency of both flavoured and unflavoured products.
Challenges in flavoured water production
The process of adding flavours to mineral water is more complex than it appears, primarily due to the risk of flavour transfer. This issue arises when flavour residues from previous production batches affect subsequent batches, especially when switching back to pure mineral water. This transfer can lead to undesirable taste changes, posing a challenge for bottling facilities that must frequently alternate between different flavours.
Standard seals, such as EPDM, often absorb flavouring compounds, complicating the cleaning process and potentially leading to contamination. Pure mineral water has the tendency of drawing even small flavour residues from seals. Specialised sealing materials with lower flavour migration properties exist but come with higher costs and reduced resistance to cleaning agents. Achieving an optimal balance between effective sealing and thorough cleaning is critical, particularly when handling both flavoured and unflavoured water in the same production line.
Additionally, switching from flavoured products to pure water necessitates extended cleaning periods to ensure all traces of flavour are removed from the system. This prolonged cleaning cycle is essential to prevent any residual flavour from contaminating the pure water, which could compromise product quality and consumer trust. The need for intensive cleaning increases downtime and operational costs, adding another layer of complexity to the production process.
Separation of water and flavour processes
A promising solution involves separating the mineral water filling process from the flavour addition until the final stages of production. By introducing a dosing system between the filling and capping stages, flavouring can be precisely added just before the bottle or can is sealed. This method mirrors the process used for injecting liquid nitrogen into lightweight bottles for stabilisation.
Advantages of a separate dosing system
The approach offers several benefits:
• Isolation of mineral water from flavour components: Prevents direct contact between the water and flavour-impacted parts of the system, maintaining the purity of the product.
• Enhanced sealing materials: High-quality, quite often expensive, seals with minimal flavor migration can be incorporated solely in the dosing system
• Efficient cleaning: A smaller dosing unit is easier and quicker to clean compared to the entire filling system, with no need for extensive adjustments.
• Seamless integration: Retrofitting existing systems with a dosing unit requires minimal modifications, offering a plug-and-play solution.
• Rapid flavour changes: Switching flavours becomes faster and more efficient without necessitating a full system cleaning.
The primary challenge in high-speed dosing is ensuring precise and consistent dosing of small quantities of flavouring into rapidly moving bottles or cans. With typical production speeds of 50,000 cph, each container requires an accurate dose—typically 1 ml—within a short window of just 15 milliseconds or less. Any misalignment in dosing could lead to flavour inconsistencies, negatively impacting product quality and brand reputation.
