Equipment at a few thousand bottles

At a few thousand bottles a year the hand process stops being charming and starts being the limit.

Find the actual bottleneck

Time the steps on a real run: cook, cool, blend, fill, cap, band, label, pack. The slow one is almost never the one that feels slow.

Producers consistently buy a better filler and stay bottlenecked at capping and banding, which is where a hand line actually stalls.

What usually pays first

A capper. Consistent torque and a large speed gain, and it removes the cross-threaded bottles that a tired hand produces at the end of a run.

A labeling applicator. Hand labeling is slow and crooked labels are the most visible quality failure you have.

A better filler. A piston or gravity filler with a foot pedal, once the two above are handled.

Cooling. Unglamorous and often the real constraint, because a batch that cannot be cooled quickly holds the kitchen and loses color.

Steam and heat

A steam kettle changes production more than any filling equipment. Even heat, no scorching, faster heat-up and a jacket you can cool through.

It is a serious purchase and it usually comes with the move out of a shared kitchen, because it needs the services and the floor space.

What not to buy

Anything that solves a problem you have not measured. Anything that only works at a volume you do not yet run. And a second bottle format, which is not equipment but doubles your inventory, artwork and case configurations for a sales gain that is rarely proportional.

Before any purchase, ask what it does to the process filing. Equipment that changes heating, cooling or fill temperature can change the process you had evaluated.

References