Heat-resistant PET bottle packaging has been welcomed by consumers due to its high transparency, strong gas barrier and portability, and has become a packaging product with great potential for development in the international beverage packaging market in recent years. In 1997, Japan's SUNTORY Corporation took the lead in launching a tea bottle beverage packaged in a heat-resistant PET bottle using Japanese Nippon Seiki's blow-molding equipment. It succeeded in the Shanghai market and achieved considerable economic benefits. In 1998, Unigroup and *New Group also introduced Taiwanese technology and introduced their own heat-resistant PET packaging tea beverages. They were welcomed by consumers in the domestic market, making tea beverages the beverage market in a very short period of time. a dark horse.
PET bottle tea beverages PET bottle beverages can be divided into three types: heat-resistant PET bottle hot filling technology, PET bottle quasi-high temperature filling technology and PET bottle aseptic filling technology. The heat-resistant PET bottle hot-filling technology is based on the premise of the commercialization of heat-resistant PET bottles. The filling is performed at a temperature of 85° C. to 95° C., and then the side caps are sterilized for 30 to 45 seconds in order to maintain the freshness. The technology has been widely used in the production of tea beverages and juice drinks in Japan, Taiwan and other countries and regions. The main feature is that the PET bottle filling equipment and its filling environment have relatively loose health requirements, and the process technology is easy to master and cao.
As a PET beverage hot-filled PET bottle, due to the need to withstand the hot filling temperature of 85 °C ~ 95 °C in the production process, so its high heat resistance requirements, while the ordinary PET heat resistance is poor, the bottle in 60 In the case of °C to 70°C, volume shrinkage and softening of the bottleneck occur, which is an unavoidable contradiction compared to the hot filling technique at a filling temperature of 85°C or more. At present, only a few Japanese companies such as Nissei of Japan, France's SIDEL, and Germany's KRVPPCORPOPLAST have developed injection blow molding equipment for the production of heat-resistant PET bottles. The equipment is expensive and has high packaging costs. The price of 500ml, 32g heat-resistant PET bottles is about 1.1 yuan/bottle, while the price of ordinary 32g PET bottles is about 0.4 yuan/bottle, which has become a barrier to the popularization of heat-resistant PET bottle filling technology. And one of the obstacles.
The quasi-hot filling technology is based on the extreme temperature resistance of ordinary PET bottles, and it also achieves the goal of keeping fresh tea beverages without adding any preservatives through the supporting filling lines, filling environment requirements and follow-up processes. . In 1998, Jiangsu Meixing Shunfeng Machinery Co., Ltd. researched and developed the second generation filling technology of tea PET bottles - quasi-hot filling technology. Through the production practice, it has been shown that the use of non-heat-resistant PET bottles for the production of tea beverages, product health indicators reached the heat-resistant PET bottles of tea health technology indicators and national standards. Since the process still has a certain filling temperature, in the selection and design of the bottle type, the bottle weight is required to be 33g or more, and a corresponding reinforcing rib is designed to resist the stress change of the PET bottle caused by the cooling of the hot filling. The PET bottle packaging market price using this technology can be reduced to 0.40-0.45 yuan/bottle.
The PET bottle aseptic filling technology is the development trend of today's beverage packaging technology, and its accompanying filling equipment has become the core content of the industrialization of the technology. At present, only a few companies in Germany, Italy and other countries have developed PET bottles. Aseptic filling machine. The Uni-President successfully used a new type of aseptic PET plastic filler developed by Tetra Pak in Taipei to fill a series of low-acid tea beverages. This was the first RFA-40 machine used to package low-acid beverages.
The packaging material used in the PET bottle aseptic filling technology can not only use ordinary PET bottles, but also because it does not need to resist the stress changes of the PET bottles caused by the cooling of the hot filling, the bottle weight can be reduced to 21 grams or less. The price can be reduced to 0.25 yuan/bottle or so, and the choice of bottles can be diversified. The reduction in product packaging costs creates opportunities for companies to occupy a place in the fierce beverage market competition.