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Until recently, if a manufacturer or packer wanted to fill aseptically, the only packaging options available were bottles or Tetra Paks.

Not that there’s anything wrong with bottles or Tetra Paks, it’s just that, as Integrapak sales manager Mike Lindsay says, “bottles are expensive and Tetra Pak is getting a bit stale and, being a squared pack, doesn’t offer much differentiation.”

However, thanks to a breakthrough in aseptic flexible packaging machinery technology, this is no longer the case. Manufacturers and packers now have at their disposal a horizontal form, fill and seal (FFS) machine for producing aseptic Doypack-type pouches.

The machine in question is the SMA-260 from Spanish equipment manufacturer Volpak, represented in the UK by Integrapak.  Lindsay sees massive potential for the technology in dairy applications for, say, milk-based drinks and yoghurt and fromage frais products.

“Basically it is suitable for any product that needs an extended shelf-life or is presently distributed through the cold chain,” he says. “The other advantage is that you can put a spout on the pouch, so the format isn’t just limited to just drinking yoghurts. ‘Spoonable’ products such as fromage frais, for example, can be squeezed.”

Several of the systems have already been installed and validated, and, unsurprisingly, Volpak’s competitors are intent on developing equivalent technology.

“We know one of our competitors sold an aseptic line last year, but they were never actually able to validate it and had to downgrade it to an ordinary pouch-filling machine because they couldn’t achieve aseptic results, whereas we have delivered a number of aseptic machines and have validation certificates,” says Lindsay.

With the competition eager to muscle in on the aseptic action, it’s understandable that Lindsay is reluctant to explain how Volpak has succeeded where others have failed.

“Because we’re the only people who can do it and our rivals are trying to copy us, we can’t give away too much about what we do, although I’m sure they’ve got a pretty good idea.”

Decontamination
Essentially, the concept is based on the principle of decontaminating the formed pouch using a vaporised H2O2 solution inside and out. By sterilising the formed pouch, the aseptic area is kept to a minimum, making it easier to control.

As well as being an industry first, this development has brought benefits to Volpak’s standard pouch producing kit.

“One of the indirect benefits is that some of the features developed for the aseptic machines have filtered down onto our ordinary machines, resulting in better efficiency,” says Lindsay. Two such features are a new cap-feeding system and a system for positioning the pouches that eliminates the need to realign the dosing equipment after a size change.

As well as the aseptic pouches, Volpak has also made progress in other areas of pouch production.

“We now have machines for producing pouches with slide zippers as opposed to just press-close resealable zippers. These are generally used for grated cheese,” says Lindsay. “The difficulty with slide zippers is that you have to seal the package over the top of the slider so that after the first use it’s a completely sealed pack.”

Volpak has also developed a vertical ‘quadruplex’ pouchmaker, the SM-360, capable of making four pouches per cycle with a top cap, at speeds of 240 pouches per minute. “That’s pretty fast for spouted pouches,” says Lindsay.

This system would typically be used for packaging dairy products and fruit purees or compotes.

Volpak is not alone in this achievement. Another Spanish company, Mespack, has delivered several quadruplex machines for filling facial creams into flat pouches with a top cap to a multinational, through its UK agent Clan Packaging.

Mespack also manufactures horizontal FFS equipment, and at this year’s Total previewed its H-150-FE system.

This model can form and fill flat three- to four-sided sachets and stand-up pouches of up to 150mm wide and 300mm high at speeds of up to 120 per minute. It can be adapted to fill any product, from powders and granules to solids, liquids and pastes. It can also incorporate any fitment or closure requirement, from reclosable zippers to built-in drinking straws, and accommodates two filling stations, allowing several different products to be filled into the same pouch.

Film transport through the machine is by servo-driven rollers, allowing the pulling pouch width to be set on the touchscreen. The film reels are fixed on pneumatically expandable reels, enabling quick reel change. The electrical cabinet is separate from the machine, which alleviates the risk of damage to the electrical components as a result of vibrations, heat and humidity.

Laudenberg, represented in the UK by Bramigk, has just launched a high-speed horizontal continuous motion machine, capable of producing 500 stand-up pouches per minute in a ‘wet’ environment.

No mean feat
“On the face of it, this may not seem that outstanding,” says Bramigk’s Phil Price. “Under very wet conditions, however, it is no mean feat to design a stand-up pouch with hot-fill processing and a residual oxygen content of below 0.5%.”

The machine uses existing intermittent technology to allow plenty of time for pouch production, but links to a new continuous-motion filling arrangement that prevents the product from splashing and contaminating the seal area.

The first machine has been sold for packing a yoghurt product into a pouch with a spout fitment.
There are still limits to the flexibility of FFS pouch design. Whereas with pre-made pouches there are infinite shape options and you can have the spout in virtually any position, with FFS, the spout has to go on the top in the middle or in a top corner.

That said, FFS pouches are no longer limited to the more conventional Doypack formats. Laudenberg’s new Cyclero machine produces round, seamless pouches, with flat tops or bottoms to resemble a can, at speeds of up to 120 per minute. The pouches can be fitted with a screw-top spout.

Historically, many manufacturers have shied away from FFS pouches on the basis of slower production speeds and inferior pack quality. However, with the speed and quality gap between pre-made and FFS pouches closing rapidly, the tide is beginning to turn.

“A lot more companies are moving over to FFS for pretty much all applications; the speed of FFS has improved greatly and so has the quality. You can still make pre-made pouches look a lot nicer, but at a cost,” says Lindsay.

This view is backed up by Bramigk’s Price. “Today, the quality of a pouch made from the reel is equivalent to that of a pre-made pouch, which significantly alters the argument of fill and seal versus form, fill and seal. It’s no longer about quality, but about flexibility.”

The pouch equipment industry might be a hotbed of innovation, but sachets are still widely used, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry.

The preference seems to be for four-side-seal machines with single formats, according to MediSeal’s Stephan Plewa.

Flexibility was a key focus for MediSeal in designing the LA400 pharmaceutical sachet machine, says Plewa, who led the team that developed the new system.

Sachet innovation
The LA400 can be deployed to package both liquid and high-viscosity products, powders, tissues and contoured sachets. Fast conversion from one product to another is assured by quick release tool holders, digital servo drive technologies and integrated quick cleaning procedure-compliant dosing systems.

Another newcomer to the four-sided-seal sachet machinery market is the Arcotronics PSF from the Italian Omag and Arcotronics Group, represented in the UK by PAP Services and Excel Packaging Machinery.

The vertical multi-lane system is designed to form and fill sachets with powders, then hermetically thermo-seal them on four sides with a platen sealing system.

Several of the machine’s design features are patented, including the film draw-off with tangential friction system, the reel splicing system, which is outside the main body of the machine to enable a sterile and class 100 filling area, and the intermittent motion sealing system with sealing jaws which open 45 degrees upwards for easy accessibility. The PSF is the first machine on the market that can be validated for seal integrity, says PAP Services.

Another Italian firm, Marchesini, represented by TMG Marchesini UK, has redesigned its vertical sachet FFS machine for the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries to incorporate a new dosing unit.

To guarantee precise dosing every time, each dosing screw feeder on the MS235 is fitted with a motor-driven secondary pre-screw feeder device that accurately feeds the product into each dosing channel. The secondary screw feeder unit is driven by an independent brushless motor drive, which has enabled Marchesini to dispense with mixers around the dosing unit. The dosing system is set up to provide weight-checking and feedback on each lane.

Marchesini says it is easy to change the sachet length by simply altering a parameter on the display. In addition, the machine can be programmed so that the dosing device is automatically removed at the end of production.

MediSeal’s Plewa says flexibility is essential in today’s sachet market: “The ever-increasing number of available products, accompanied by ever-shorter batch sizes, is a trend in edge-seal sachet packaging which has gained importance in recent years.”