Rising demand for specialty tea means that fill lines will only get faster.
Fill and pack equipment manufacturers such as IMA Industries, HST, and Teepack offer equipment to fill and pack round, single and double-chamber, naked and tagged tea bags, and filter pods. Filters of nonwoven fabric made with non-heat and heat-seal materials allow production rates up to 600 bags per minute. Conventional bag packaging machines can achieve overwrap and envelope rates up to 2,000 per minute filling 100-count cartons in the blink of an eye.
Irregular-sized inclusions are an important consideration. Pyramid bagging machines with multiple weigh bin from Fuso, and tea packers like the Mai s.a. Optima currently achieve run rates of 120 bags per minute. Machines making the popular new drip-style bags with overwrap run at 50 bags per minute.
The latest generation single-serve capsule machines such as IMA’s 595/6 fills and seals 480 tea capsules a minute. Rychiger’s FS910 in a 12 x 2 lane configuration produces 86,400 capsules per hour.
Close up of BioWeb filter material
Maintaining these production speeds is critical. That is why a blender’s first priority in filter papers is runability, according to Véronique Delannoy, Ahlstrom marketing manager for food & medical in the Finnish company’s research and services offices in France. “Our tea webs are increasingly lightweight yet super strong, to showcase colorful inclusions,” she said. “After all, a tea bag is the vehicle that carries the brand image of a product, whether through a pattern, its touch and feel, or its transparency and taste neutrality,” she said.
“High on the list is also the consumer experience brought by their product: they need an exceptional visual experience for higher end teas and infusions, and optimal flavor diffusion in the cup,” said Delannoy. Tea companies want their teabags to stand out in a sea of offerings on the shelf, she said.
Blenders traditionally consider seal strength, the rate of infusion, and the teabag’s ability to retain the smallest tea particles without imparting taste. While inexpensive and effective in retaining small particles, paper filters offer poor transparency and paper cannot be heat sealed. Nonwoven papers offer a wide range of sealing temperatures but require a variety of fibers. Operating efficiency makes minimizing knife-wear a priority.
“In the past few years a new major trend is also emerging: our customers now also ask for a new, more sustainable generation of materials,” she said. Customers have sustainability objectives and requirements to meet third-party certifications “so they are looking for sustainably sourced materials, and filter attributes that will allow them to make claims of biodegradability and compostability on their final product,” she added.
“We developed a new line of sustainable BioWeb products that are backed up by official certification that allows our customers to make compostability claims, while retaining their functional performance,” she said.
“We’re not only expanding our innovative portfolio to run optimally on more and more machines, we are also looking at new applications like single-serve coffees and teas where our compostable materials can be used,” she said.
Strong customer service is important. Blenders must reply on their tea web partner to support them in a timely, efficient manner. “Our technical customer service team is also there to make sure the product runs smoothly,” she said.
Ahlstrom has taken a great deal of time to listen to these needs and offers the broadest product line on the market today, she explained. “Whether non-heat seal or heat seal, we have a product for every machine. Our tea web products are there to showcase our customer’s teas and infusions with a high transparency, and preserve and enhance the taste of tea,” she said.